Rita Arens's blog

When Does Bullying Start and Stop?

2009-11-09T05:00:00-06:00

My five-year-old has been lucky so far. She's never been bullied.

That I know about.

She entered kindergarten this year, though, and it got me to thinking about how many more kids there are in ratio to fewer adults. And playgrounds. And older kids mixed with younger kids. And younger kids mixed with younger kids. And just kids being mean in general. And I started getting a little nervous for my wee one.

It turns out bullying can start as young as five. Heather at A Mama's Blog wrote this about two older boys pushing her kindergarten son around on the playground:

He rode over to me, and I flat out asked him, if he had told my little boy he had a gun and he was going to shoot him. He said no, and told me he was a good kid. He said he had only told Ryan he had a toy gun. I asked him why he had pushed Ryan, and he denied that. I told him I had seen him push Ryan’s back. He looked down at his shoes. I asked him what his name was, and how old he was. He told me his name, and then told me he was all of eight years old. I asked him if the other boy (Baggy Pants) was his brother and he said no-they were friends. He then told me his name, and told me he was ten.

Margaret at Parenting Squad wrote a good post on how to tell if your kid is being bullied or is bullying.

Here's one of her tips on handling your angel the bully:

Know about the violence. Confront your little angel. How will our bully/angels ever stop bullying if we parents ignore it and don’t discuss it with our bully/angels? They need to know what they did was wrong. Not confronting it will not make it go away. When my daughter was on a biting spree I asked her every day whether or not she bit someone and whether she’d stopped (she had).

Much of what I'm reading about bullying also talks about the bystanders and their role. As a parent, I am up in people's business all the time, much to my own horror. It's like some switch flipped in me when I gave birth that compels me to go up to crying children I don't know if they look like they are alone or lost. In the literature, there's no agreement as to whether a parent should get involved or let the bullied child deal with it personally. The bets are off for me if I see it going on when other adults aren't around. We can call kids out on their behavior and let them know on no uncertain terms it's not okay.

Kelly at Five Minutes for Mom writes:

When you witness bullying happening, model for your kids how to stop it. Address issues with children and their parents, on the playground, park or birthday parties. Be respectful, but direct and name the behavior: “Bullying isn’t tolerated here.”

Have your kids been bullied or been bullies themselves? What did you do?

Our Daughters' Hair Length: Let the Armchair Psychoanalysis Begin

2009-11-02T05:00:00-06:00

My daughter's hair is crazy long. Like past-her-waist long. People ask me all the time if I've ever cut it (she had a bob when she was two and gets it cut every few months) and if it's hard to take care of (heck, yes). You see, I don't make her cut until it fails the toilet test.

You read that right.

The toilet test goes like this: Put child on closed toilet. Have her lean back. If her hair piles on the toilet seat, that means it'll hit the water when she leans back while doing her business. AND THAT IS DISGUSTING. So we cut a few inches off and wait for the whole thing to happen again.

(exhibit a)

Both sets of grandmas ask her all the time if she wants to put it up or cut it into a bob. Not only does she not want to cut it, she doesn't even want a ponytail. The only time she'll let me braid it or put it up is for ballet class, and that's only because she fears the wrath of her Angelina Ballerina old-school teacher. And on my birthday. She lets me do her hair on my birthday. As my present. And so this past year, I let her grow out her bangs, even though doing so made me want to stick a fork in my eyeball every morning as I forced 32 tiny plastic clippies into her head.

(exhibit b)

Though I don't think she'd die or I'd die if we did cut it back into that bob she had at two (which was totally cute, and at two, totally necessary), I just don't see the point in forcing her to cut her hair that short. There are so few things children can control, and shouldn't their hair be one of them? I mean, there aren't any small animals growing in there, are there? What's up with everyone caring about little girls' hair length?

Tracee at The Girl Revolution wrote a great post a few years ago musing on the meaning of her daughter's hair to her husband.

I then made a huge blunder. I dropped my 3-year-old daughter off at my mother-in-law’s with permission to give her a “long bob, long enough for a ponytail.” She came back with a short Dorothy Hamill pixie cut. When my husband saw it, he got so upset he nearly cried and then left furious about what I had done.

There seems to be something magical about a little girl's hair for some folks. I know several women who told me they didn't cut their hair until they were six or seven. EVER. I can't imagine how long their hair was, because we constantly cut my daughter's and it JUST GROWS BACK.

And then, on the flip side, you have really really short haircuts and all the gender discussions that can lie therein. A Modern Mother writes:

I stopped and looked at my middle daughter, not knowing what to say. To save money, my father cut our hair (all five of us rug rats). After one of these barber sessions, my mother dressed me in a new frock and sent me to a friend's party. I remember a group of girls, hands on hips, telling me that boys shouldn't wear dresses. I was devastated, and vowed to never cut my hair short again. I still have long hair.

While she didn't cut her daughter's hair pixie-short, Felicia Lobato really likes her daughter's dramatically shorter 'do:

Her first hair cut was more of a trim but this time we didn't trim it we CUT it all off. I have no regrets although everyone keeps asking why? She loves her haircut and she actually wanted it that short. I notice it gave her a lot more confidence & that's what kids need.

Short hair, long hair, up or down -- does it really matter? How much control do you try to maintain over your kid's hair?

From Happy Days to Hoarders: What Do You Think of What Your Teens Watch?

2009-10-26T06:00:00-05:00

BlogHer's Shannon wrote an insightful post looking into preschool television shows back in January. But what about television that tweens and teens watch? Television that you and I watch (or will watch someday) with our kids? I'm not talking about individual shows, I'm talking about television in general. With a gazillion channels to choose from and DVRs abounding, one can certain insulate against undesirable shows easily. But what about our kids?

Kids watch what their friends watch, what everyone is talking about. So even if you personally don't watch certain shows, you can bet your kids are soaking in the messages they see on the small screen.You could judge television a million ways to Sunday, so I picked a few measures using my own completely unscientific method.

First up: race. Do you think TV is more racially diverse now than it was when you were a kid? Is it better or worse? A year ago, The Angry Black Black Woman wrote about people of color on television.

Anyway, this touched off a conversation between my cousin and myself about the state of television for PoC now versus 30 years ago. It seemed to both of us that there were more PoC on TV back when we were kids (in the 1970s, right after the Civil Rights movement) than there are now. They were not good depictions back then — one-dimensional, prone to early death, bizarrely good at martial arts — but they were depictions. These days it seems hard even to get that much.

The two new shows I started watching this season are Glee and Modern Family. Modern Family has a very stereotypical Columbian woman and her son, Manny. Also, sort of, Manny's deadbeat dad. Glee has an Asian girl who plays a major role, but the cast is pretty solidly white. In comparison, some of the older shows I watch -- Grey's Anatomy, Lost, Private Practice -- have a more diverse cast in which race doesn't seem token or even a storyline. You may disagree, but I found it very refreshing that the black couple is the power couple on Private Practice and the chief of surgery and his right-hand woman are both black on Grey's. Lost does a good job of featuring interracial relationships in which race isn't discussed as a factor.

Next: Gay and lesbian characters. I see more of them (and more of them portrayed as people instead of as gay people) than I did when I was a kid. In fact, I don't remember there being any gay people on television when I was a kid. The first gay character I remember was the guy on Melrose Place. According to Des Pardes, things are looking up for the LGBT community:

Some 44 lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) characters make regular appearances in scripted shows on network and mainstream cable TV in the new 2009-10 television season, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), said in its annual “Where We Are on TV” report.

Finally, there's violence / overexposure / destruction of privacy / drug problems reality television. We had variety shows and game shows when I was a kid, but The Real World was my first taste of reality television, and I think I was in high school or college when it came out. I remember being quite shocked those people would say and do those things on NATIONAL TELEVISION. Seems kind of quaint, my thinking that, doesn't it?

Reality television is getting better as it gets worse, according to Kellie Herson at the St. Norbert Times online blog:

At least you can feel like a kind-hearted creeper when you watch Intervention-after all, you're watching someone get better and work through their addiction. You just don't get the same benevolent feeling from watching an awkward divorce, or seeing a guy roll up a frozen pizza and eat it like a taco, or trying to determine which Duggar belongs to which "J" name and how their patriarch ever held political office.

I still say we're two seasons away from Running Man.

What do you see? What do your teens and tweens watch? What do they say about the families and characters they watch? Do you think we've moved forward or backwards?

Will Your School-Agers Still Need Book Covers in Five Years?

2009-10-19T06:00:00-05:00

E-books, man. They're infiltrating schools. Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Conn., got rid of the 20,000 books in its school library, trading up to flatscreens, Kindles and computers only. And now that Google has paired with On Demand Books (the company that invented a book vending machine), schools could potentially serve up printed e-books in the public domain like cotton candy.

I actually think e-books make the most sense in a university setting. College textbooks are insanely expensive, heavy and difficult to unload when the class is over. Carrying all my textbooks at once down to the union to sell back used to be back-breaking, and it was disheartening to turn in $800 worth of books and get back $50 four months later.

In graduate school, I spent hundreds of dollars every semester on fiction paperbacks, some of which were pretty obscure and most of which are probably now in the public domain. I kept some of them, but most of them were virtually unsellable after I read them and marked them up.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, some colleges are already heading in this direction, turning their Web sites into download centers for free e-books assigned commonly.

So the groups -- the National Association of College Stores and the Canadian Campus Retail Associates Inc. -- have pooled their resources to develop a shared system. Each store can integrate it into its own Web site, to let students buy and download an electronic text in just a few clicks, similar to the way Amazon and other online retailers do.

For high schools and elementary schools, I'm not so sure. Right now, they're still really expensive. And can you rely on kids to not break their fancy gadget readers? If you could, I'm sure schools could save hundreds of thousands of dollars on printed textbooks that will be outdated in a just a few years. But for young readers, I think the physical book is necessary. I agree with Mary Pearson of Tor.com:

But there is an advantage that I think has nothing to do with old habits. A traditional book offers no distractions. No pop-ups, no games, no bells, no whistles. Just you, the book, and your thoughts. Time to sit, reflect, ponder, and make connections. How often when looking at a computer screen can you do that without the temptation to fill it with one of those bells and whistles? With a book the only bells and whistles are your thoughts. That is no small thing.

Even more eerie is the topic of censorship. I hadn't even thought about that -- and it always seems most worrisome in high school settings, when kids are reading books that will forever change the way they view the world. Philly Teacher points out that readers connecting regularly with the mothership can suddenly "lose" books that have been purchased if the home server removes them. He writes:

While I would like to believe that we are way past the days of banned books, the world will never rid itself of those who feel that certain topics, themes and words are not appropriate for our children. Should all of the textbooks and required reading texts in a school be accessed as eBooks, then districts can easily remove the book from use without having to collect books from classrooms and without discussing it with anyone first.

Um, yikes. Whether or not we love the idea of e-books, I suspect at least universities will move toward them because of budget concerns. What do you think? Is this a crazy idea?

Join the Family Connections group and weigh in on what kind of technology your kids are using at school. The Family Connections Group is BlogHer’s community journalism project, where you report on your own family.

Do You Fight in Front of Your Kids? I Do. Sort of.

2009-10-15T06:00:00-05:00

Some parents never fight in front of their kids, and their kids grow up fine. Some parents scream at each other day, and their kids grow up fine. And some in each camp end up with kids who either think a fight means the end of the world or that love is best expressed by yelling and cursing.

What's the right thing to do?

I can't even begin to answer this question without first defining "fighting." Do we mean a civil disagreement? Or do we mean throwing cats? Because I personally believe even screaming at each other is fine as long as you are both fighting fair and you end the whole affair by apologizing and accepting responsibility for the emotional meltdown in front of your kids, as well.

Every couple has a fighting style, just as every individual comes out swinging in his or her own unique way. I'm a writer, so I tend to want to turn every argument over and over, talking it to death long after the other participant has walked out of the room in disgust. Nothing makes me more angry than being ignored or being shut down before I've said my piece. So if I'm ticked off about something, I want to have it out, get resolution, and move on as quickly as possible. I don't like to sit and stew in my own juices, which tend to be acrid.

My husband would die if I wrote about our personal fighting style on the Internet, so I'm not going to drag him into this post. Suffice it to say that in eight years of marriage, we've had to accept our differences and learn to agree to disagree. We've learned to really examine whether or not we care about the subject at hand. I'm always tempted to win every argument just for the sake of winning it, and I had to learn to just let it go. Winning an argument doesn't mean you are better than your opponent. It just means you either cared more about the topic or were more willing to invest yourself in winning it. That, in and of itself, is both freeing and a good example for kids -- in my humble opinion.

As parents, I think we have to model fair fighting. It's nearly impossible to never fight in front of your kids, but I'm not sure you should have your knock-down drag-outs in front of them. Arguing over who's going to wash the car? Game on. Arguing about how to parent or money? NUNCA. I don't think you should argue about anything that might make your kids feel insecure in front of them. Kids don't understand money or parenting the way we do, and they may either fear life as they know it hangs delicately in the balance or that they somehow cause all of your arguments if you thrash that stuff out in front of them.

If you do happen to let loose (and we all do at some point), at the very least explain to your kids that just because you two fight doesn't mean you don't love each other or them. Adults fight just like kids do, and kids get that. The important part is letting the argument have a beginning and an end -- old arguments that drag on and on aren't going to win you any parenting awards.

Also? I think as often as possible you should agree to disagree in front of your kids. It's the foundation for civil disagreement, and kids don't learn civil disagreement nearly enough in their day-to-day lives, at least from my vantage point. Teaching kids when to stand up and fight and when to let it drop will be invaluable lessons to them later in life -- and can in fact even make their lives better and easier.

So yeah, I think you should fight in front of your kids.

Sort of.

Child Care: It Never Gets Easier to Choose

2009-10-13T17:20:00-05:00

My daughter started kindergarten this year, and because we wanted to ease her transition, we left her in her normal daycare for before-and-after-school care instead of putting her in the program run by the public school system.

Even though it cost $200 a month more.

Now that the school year is in full swing, we desperately want to switch her into the cheaper solution. The care is just as good, and going forward she'd be more likely to be in with other friends from school. The biggest drawback? The school-provided program has a two-week break in August.

For my husband and me, who have no family in Kansas City, two weeks is an eternity. Two weeks is too long for either of us to take off work. It's too long to tell a boss we need to work from home. It's too long to pretend to be sick. It's just two weeks too long for a break in childcare.

So we hem. And we haw. Could we string together some back-up? Pay the neighbors? When the public school program director called me to discuss it, she kidded, "You just need to find some dependable teenagers in your neighborhood."

I wanted to reach through the phone and wring her neck, because I've been looking for those damn dependable neighborhood teenagers for FIVE LONG YEARS, and I'm still paying my babysitters $10 an hour for one kid.

So back to the childcare thing. It sucks! It sucked when my daughter was a baby, and it sucks now. Even though I really liked her provider in the past two years since we've moved to the suburbs, I didn't like the price tag AT ALL. It was still another mortgage payment, no matter how you cut it. I honestly don't know how people with more than one kid can afford daycare.

The experience starts out sucking at the baby level. Do you go with in-home or institutional? Tela at Working Moms Against Guilt writes:

I was looking into both daycare facilities and people who watched children out of their home. The individuals who watched children out of the home were less expensive, on the wholesale, than daycare facilities. However, I felt, for some reason, more comfortable with daycare. For most people, it's quite the opposite. They like the homey, warm atmosphere of a home-run "daycare". I liked the facilities because they seem more professional, more capable, more experienced.

Others, like Jen at Jennepper prefer the in-home alternative:

The first time I took her to the sitter (we decided against the daycare center because of all of the reflux issues she was having), it was all very uneventful. The sitter picked her up, and Olivia smiled at her, and I left feeling pretty OK about the whole thing.

And still others start off working after their kids are born and run screaming from the world of work after bad child care burns them out faster than any scene straight out of The Office. Lena at The Cheeky Lotus writes:

Savannah went to after school care at the Y. I disliked it from the start. And by disliked I mean I spent a lot of time Googling the care providers names and spying through the windows at pick up.

I honestly thought once my daughter hit kindergarten -- especially because she's in all-day kindergarten -- that this whole care thing would get easier. HA HA HA HA

Sue Shellenbarger at the WSJ blog writes:

That frustrating three-hour window between the elementary- or middle-school dismissals and the end of the workday can drive parents to do risky things. Some leave kids home alone; others send them to malls, on the theory that any public setting is safer. One mother whose after-school program was running a long waiting list regularly sent her 12-year-old son to the public library. She told the librarian he would be coming and instructed him “to study there until we could pick him up,” says this Massachusetts mother.

So we're still struggling with this issue for now. I'm hoping we'll no longer be paying $20 a day for two hours of care by after the holidays.

What the heck do you do, if you work outside the home?

Parenting in a Digital World

2009-10-12T06:00:00-05:00

You've seen the talk shows and heard the playgroup buzz: What the heck are we doing about the influence of social media, cell phones, games and other technology on our little angels?

Fear not! We're here to help! Over the next six months, BlogHer is taking on a groundbreaking experiment in citizen journalism with regard to parenting in the digital age. Our digital parenting ambassadors will post analysis of breaking stories, trends, and the activities of BlogHer moms from a variety of angles. In addition, the ambassadors will blog insightful personal posts that shed light on their own parenting within the matrix. We'll be rolling out essays, technology round-ups and general navel-gazing.

We'll cover geeky parenting, technology as it's embedded in our daily lives (as parents and as participants in the community), tech trendspotting, parenting headaches and triumphs caused by our devices and the social media sphere, and the same great parenting writing you're used to seeing here. Parenting, after all, is still parenting, whether or not you're doing it with your Blackberry attached.

I know I'm excited -- I've been a BlogHer Mommy & Family contributing editor for more than three years now, and this topic has come up so many times for me personally. I'm thrilled to be working with the talented group of writers who'll be bringing you this important information.

In addition, BlogHer will host a Family Connections BlogHer group to which all our digital parenting posts will be published. The easiest way to stay in the loop is to join the group. So what are you doing? Click on over and join!

We can't wait to hear your thoughts. This is a conversation, and we want to hear from YOU -- be your own beat reporter covering the ups and downs of parenting your cyberific kids. With my own daughter in kindergarten, I need your help navigating the dark waters. Come along for the ride, my friends.

Rita Arens is an editor in corporate America and a freelance writer. Her bylines have appeared in Scholastic Parent & Child, Babble, The Kansas City Star, Greater Kansas City Business, KC Weddings, and Art. She's the editor of Sleep Is for the Weak: The Best of the Mommybloggers Including Amalah, Finslippy, Fussy, Woulda Coulda Shoulda, Mom-101, and More!, which won a 2009 gold NAPPA award and has short fiction and poetry available on Kindle.

Join BlogHer’s new community journalism project! Report on how you and your family interact with technology in the age of digital parenting in the Family Connections group.

Pregnancy! It's a Big, Fat Surprise!

2009-10-05T06:00:00-05:00

Julia Grovenburg is pregnant with Jillian.

And Hudson.

And they weren't conceived at the same time.

But they might be born at the same time.

But if they were actually born on their due dates, they'd be born in different years. One this year, one in 2010.

It's called "superfetation."

My head hurts.

HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN?

Apparently, it happens all the time to rabbits.

And it wouldn't be so much of a problem if they could pop out one at a time, but I'm guessing once you start expelling objects from your womb, it pretty much empties. Thank goodness in the case of the Grovenburgs, Jillian and Hudson are only about 2.5 weeks apart, so chances are good Jillian could hang out for an extra week or Hudson could be born a little early and everything would be okay.

When I was pregnant I was amazed at how much of it was guesswork on my doctor's part. With all the technology and medical advances, it's very difficult to predict anything about human gestation. Once you're pregnant, all you know is that you're going to give birth somehow, someway.

From the blog associated with Vital Records search (random!):

Apparently, this is called superfetation. ‘Super’ indeed. Other more common reproductive surprises include:
Multiples – “Yeah, you know how you were getting ready for one baby? Well, you’re having eight. Isn’t that wonderful?” As a father of twins, I can tell it is wonderful… after three long years of sleeplessness and high stress.
Gender Oops – “You know how you bought all those pink onesies and painted the room pink and bought the entire Barbie collection? Well, it’s not a girl after all. Of course, that means it’s a boy.” Despite advances in ultrasound tech, this continues to happen.

In other surprises, Jeanne Sager writes at Strollerderby about a woman in Indonesia who gave birth to a 19-pound baby boy. OW OW OW OW OW

Which then brings me to the age-old question of whether or not you can get pregnant during your period. According to Carolyn Kubik, a fertility specialist at BabyCenter, um, yes.

Typically, when you have your period, another egg is developing in preparation for release during the current cycle. But not every woman's cycle length is the same. Many women have a cycle that's about 28 days long, but some have cycles as short as 22 days long. If you have a shorter cycle, you could ovulate just a few days after you have your period. And considering that sperm can survive in your reproductive tract for up to three days, it's theoretically possible for the sperm to hang around until you ovulate again.

Did you have any surprises when you gave birth?

Storytelling: When You Hear the Bell, Turn the Page

2009-09-28T06:00:00-05:00

When my in-laws were packing up their house to move, my husband discovered a huge pile of story albums. I practically drooled over them -- but there was no record player in the house.

Well, we bought them one. And I can't wait to listen to those records. When I was a kid, I had Cinderella, Bullfrogs & Butterflies and a smattering of others. When we took my daughter to Disney World earlier this year, my husband (who'd never been) sat dumbfounded to find he knew everything about It's a Small World from a Disney record he'd had as a kid. I can still sing every song from my Sesame Street record.

Nancy at Dabbled has this great record collection of the exact albums I'm talking about: Mary Poppins, Sesame Street, Snoopy -- not always stories, but recordings in the style of old radio programs.

I've reviewed some audio books and bought some audio books, but it's not the same to hold a regular book as it was to hold that huge album book expectantly while slapping your sister's hand away when she tried to turn the page BEFORE THE BELL.

What is it about listening to a book read aloud that's so great? As a kid, it was staring at the pictures and hearing more than one voice tell the story. I also really loved the songs that usually accompanied. While physically being able to read words on a page is certainly important, listening can be more relaxing.

Luke at Sonlight Blog writes:

The power of books are the stories and the worlds they contain. And Sonlight's books, in particular, allow us to experience history in a powerful and memorable way. And listening is just as effective a way of learning as reading to yourself. And there is little better than spending time together listening to the same story that mom or dad is reading.

Many writers, like Stephanie of Letter Blocks, mention letting kids listen to audio books on long car trips:

So many of the wonderful guest writers here on Letter Blocks talked about how they read before they went to bed at night, and how beloved childhood books helped them become the talented authors they are today. I truly believe that every child can, and should, have that same experience, even if it’s by embracing the evolution of technology. On our recent trip to visit Grandma, I left the laptop at home and brought audio books instead. Before the trip I went to the library and picked out a few CDs I thought Anna would like. After a bit of hemming and hawing on her part, she accepted the fact that her ears, instead of her eyes, would have to do the work this time. And you know what? She enjoyed the story.

Do you remember your favorite book-on-record? Or on CD, if you're, like, totally younger than me? Do your kids have any favorites?

Type A Mother: Make Your Bed or I Will Twitch

2009-09-23T08:00:00-05:00

My mother tells me I used to wake up in the middle of the night and clean my room. This? Does not bode well for motherhood. Hi, my name is Rita, and I'm a Type A mother when it comes to housekeeping.

Since my daughter entered kindergarten, I've relaxed my standards a bit for her room. I still dust it and vacuum it every week, and I try to force her to make her bed each morning. Sometimes she does, and sometimes she doesn't. With extreme effort, I try not to nag. But I can't stop myself from sneaking into her room and making her bed. (*twitches*)

I think she's inherited (from nature or nurture?) some of my quirks. She'll spend a half hour rearranging her snowglobe collection, and I often walk into her room to find she's taken everything off her shelves and made a Nordstrom window display in the middle of the floor.

Fortunately for me, my husband is into cleaning, too. We clean every week, though I've had to give up on taking everything off the shelves to dust that often. (I used to.)
I got a lot of it from my mom, who gave us chores either to keep us busy or because she really wanted every chair leg in the house dusted -- at this point, I'm not sure which is which.

I've also struggled as a parent with how much to push on the cleanliness front. I don't want to nag or send the message there's something wrong with her if her room isn't always picked up, but I also don't want to -- no, can't -- live with visual chaos. A cluttered room makes me physically twitchy. I used to clean my apartment when I stayed home sick from work because I couldn't actually be sick in a messy environment. I can't really relax when things aren't tucked away where I can't really see them. What's inside those shelves doesn't bother me nearly as much as what's on the floor.

What does this mean for her? Probably that she'll rebel and be a complete slob after she moves out, at least for a period of time. It's my hope that she'll learn to love the scent of clean sheets, that she'll be able to lift her mood with a vacuum cleaner, but I realize that a clean house does not make for a better person. There are variations of "clean" that are certainly acceptable, and every time I wander into her room and see the sticky clay sculptures she brought home from daycare still sitting on her bookshelf, I tuck my hands under my armpits to keep myself from throwing them away. They are so messy, and they totally don't go with the colors of her room, either.

I realize how bad this sounds. Believe me, the self-awareness of my persnickety ways is torture enough.

But I've always been like this. I come by it honestly. Some people don't see the value in spending time cleaning, and I can't stop myself from doing it. I don't think it matters which you do, but I hope that my daughter will see my need to buy a basket in which to store every pile of her school papers isn't a reflection on her but on me. I like her papers, really I do, but my Lord, I must organize them the minute they come out of her backpack or she will have to watch her dear mother devolve into a nervous wreck.

I try to combat her future therapy by telling her it will be fun to organize her things together. So far, she's buying it. Stay tuned for her painting her walls black and storing used food wrappers under her bed as a teenager.

If you're a bit of a neat freak, leave your link here. If you're not... visit Sarah's post and leave your link there.

Back-to-School: Sandwich Generation Edition

2009-09-21T06:00:00-05:00

The newness of back-to-school has worn off, and we're settling into our parenting routines. Right? Except for those members of the sandwich generation who never quite know what to expect from their aging parents. What do you do when you have soccer practice at the same time as your father's doctor appointment? Your father who can't drive anymore? Replicate yourself?

Taking care of kids and elderly parents is never easy, but the issues compound exponentially at work: Now you've gone from needing your own sick days (if you're lucky enough to have them) to needing sick days to care for ill kids and ill parents, as well -- facts that don't bode well for the upcoming flu season.

Take it one step farther? Single mom Mary at The Women's Journal writes:

I received the call early on Sunday morning. My father was undergoing emergency heart surgery. I felt helpless. My immediate reaction was to get on a plane and fly to Minnesota to provide the support he needed; however the reality of the situation was much different. I am what is now coined as the classical “sandwich generation” working full time, single mother of three faced with caring for my parent.

Mary must be a sleepless super creature to hold all that together.

I'm getting to the age in which my friends' parents are growing elderly. I'm 35 but have friends in their late forties and early fifties who face both high school sports schedules and parents who can no longer drive or live independently. Who gets first dibs on their time?

Though my own mother was a 1970s member of the sandwich generation as her mother needed care while we were still living at home, I'm amazed at how many of my hometown friends' grandparents are still alive when my grandmother has been dead almost twenty years. There's one significant difference between them and me: Maternal age at the time of birth. My mom was only one year younger when she had me than I was when I had my daughter.

Eliza writes at Silver and Grace:

Why is the Sandwich Generation membership expanding?
There are several reasons why concurrently caring for children and parents is becoming more prevalent:

1. We are having our children later in life, such that we still have school age children well into our forties, and possibly fifties

2. Our children are living at home longer, not leaving until well into their twenties

3. Our parents are living longer, with the average life expectancy now surpassing 80 years old

At the same time sandwichers are being squeezed harder for time, there's less support nearby. Fewer people live in their hometowns and have local relatives to lean on to watch the kids for a few hours or pick someone up from school when there's a conflict. If there are no free options, care must be paid care, and in a down economy, even the wallet's having to call sides.

Lauren Young writes at Market Mix-up:

But now, Campbell and her husband, Dave, 56, are finding themselves pinched in ways they hadn’t anticipated. They’re putting their son and daughter through California Polytechnic State University at the cost of roughly $20,000 a year for each . They’re also digging deep into savings to care for their aging parents. So when the couple’s retirement investments lost 38% last year, their plan to slow down and shift to volunteer work in the next few years had to be put on hold.

How do you handle it when you need to be two places at once for kids and for parents? How do you get relief and support from your time spent caregiving? And where does your money go when everyone needs you?

Vitamins: Love 'Em or Leave 'Em?

2009-09-18T06:00:00-05:00

I remember my children's vitamins clearly. They were pastel purple, pink and yellow, and they tasted like Pez. I longed to take the whole bottle, for I loved them so.

And I don't give my daughter vitamins with any sort of regularity.

We've tried from time to time. When she was a baby, we gave her some vitamin drops of some sort after her pediatrician recommended them. I can't remember if she recommended them when I was breastfeeding or when she was on formula. After that, we didn't worry about it for years on end because she was such a good eater of the vegetables and the fruits and the meats. I figured she was getting everything she needed from her food.

My girl never really went through an all-white-food stage or anything like that. I tried giving her vitamins earlier this year when she started getting nosebleeds, but she hated them. It was such a struggle to get her to take them that we just upped the ante on fruits and vegetables and started making her drink orange juice more often. I have no idea if the nosebleeds were connected to diet or if her nasal passages were just really dry, but they stopped, and we stopped forcing the vitamin issue.

From time to time I'll look at them perched on top of the refrigerator and wonder if I should buy a different kind, if I should try harder, if I should force it. Honestly, she eats a varied diet and has vegetables with every meal, so in the long list of daily battles (what to wear, she won't let me brush her hair, but I have to brush her hair, and she doesn't want to go to school, and she doesn't want to take a bath, and she wants to eat Backwards Dinner, and she wants more books, and she is really upset about the state of American healthcare) I just don't have the energy to fight the vitamin battle.

Also? I'm a little afraid of her loving them too much and wanting to down the whole bottle.

Do you give your kids vitamins? Are they really necessary? Do they really help? I just can't tell.

My Kid Has to Sit in a Car Seat for How Long?

2009-09-14T06:00:00-05:00

One of my co-workers was looking into convertible car seats the other day. She asked me my opinion about car seats, and boy, was she in for it. My daughter, who's now a svelte five-year-old, was such a large baby that she grew out of her carrying-case car seat (you know, the infant kind you lug around, giving yourself permanent back pain?) when she was four months old.

You heard me right.

My daughter was so young when she got too tall for her car seat that she wasn't really even sitting up by herself really well when we had to buy two convertible car seats. Our first carrying case purchase was relatively easy -- one carrying case and two bases. Because my husband and I both work, we never really know who will be picking up the child. Also, until you get to the booster stage, you don't want to be installing and uninstalling a car seat really, um, ever, without professional help. So that meant at four months, we had to buy two convertible car seats. And they were so not cheap.

We ended up buying an convertible infant sofa for our main car. It was a great carseat, but it was really big, and it was almost round in its shape, making it virtually impossible for two adults to squeeze in on either side of it in the back seat. I couldn't wait for her to grow out of it and was intensely relieved when she hit the height and weight requirements for her current boosters.

Of course, then we had to buy two of them, one for each car.

The good news is that booster seats are way less pricey than convertible car seats. The bad news: Now we had one carrying case, two bases and two convertible car seats that nobody wanted to buy because they were used. I ended up giving one convertible to a close friend and donating the others to a daycare for inner city kids that took them after I signed some statement swearing they'd never been in an accident. I never expected to get any money back from the investment, but it can be hard to stare at almost a thousand dollars worth of plush and plastic and realize you only used it for a few years.

Can you buy them used? Car seats are crazy expensive, and the prevailing wisdom is that you should never buy a used car seat because you never know if they've been in an accident. But seriously? You know how much these things COST? Some moms take a calculated risk. Frugal Babe writes:

So there you have it. We got a super safe carseat for $75, and saved the world a bit by recycling rather than buying new. Each to their own, and I’m sure some people wouldn’t feel comfortable buying a carseat used. But it’s easy to check recalls online, and my mindset is to buy used whenever possible.

If you're going to buy a used car seat, do your research first. There's a ton of great information online. Linda and Cara of Baby Bunching have purchased 12 car seats between the two of them and have all their advice here. They write:

Like in most other aspects of Baby Bunching, hindsight is 20/20 when it comes to car seat purchases. If we had a nickel for every time we thought "If I'd only known then what I know now", we'd have enough money for an entire warehouse of Britax Marathons and Bugaboo strollers.

Another car seat pain point is travel. Do you take the base for a carrying case? (We didn't on our first flight with my daughter after calling the car seat company and finding out there are instructions on the side for how to strap just the infant seat into a seat belt without the base. I wouldn't do it every day, but it was quite secure and taking the base would've been hellish.)

Or ... do you rent a car seat with your rental car? Eek. I don't recommend it. Our own Mir Kamin wrote a round-up of travel carseat rental horror stories that make me happy we've always taken ours along when we fly anywhere. It's no fun: They're heavy, they're bulky and they induce glares from fellow travelers. You can check them, but we always just installed it on the plane -- it provided my daughter with somewhere to sleep, and I didn't have to hold a squirmy toddler for three hours.

Now that she's five, there are plenty of days that I look back and think "Will she be in that thing forever?" She doesn't seem like she needs it. But child passenger safety technician El at Profoundly Seth writes:

After your child is mature enough to sit properly in a booster, settle in for a while. Kids need to ride in a booster until they can pass the 5 Step Test.

That means you need to be able to say 'Yes' to all of these questions:

1. Does your child sit all the way back against the vehicle seat?

2. Do your child's knees bend comfortably at the edge of the vehicle seat?

3. Does the shoulder belt cross your child's shoulder between his neck and arm?

4. Does the lap belt cross your childs hips as low as possible, touching the thighs?

5. Can your child remain seated like this the whole trip?

At the end of the day, car seats and boosters are worth their weight in gold, as long as they're installed properly. How many car seats have you gone through? Do you regret purchasing so many? Did you go convertible from the get-go? Did you keep your convertible and by-pass the booster? Any advice for the rookies?

Here's my advice: Think hard about how long you want your kid to be strapped in so she can't move. Many convertible boosters go up to 65 pounds now -- which sounds great until you have to hand your six-year-old something she dropped on the floor because she can't lean forward AT ALL.

Family Entertainment: Improving or Deteriorating?

2009-09-08T12:01:21-05:00

I grew up on a farm. I always think that is so normal, because most of my friends in Kansas City grew up in little towns in Iowa, Kansas or Missouri. It's mostly when I talk to my friends from the Interwebs that I realize my upbringing was so totally Huck Finn compared to the suburban or city childhoods they experienced.

Family entertainment for us usually revolved around school events, family gatherings and outdoor activities. My sister and I did the cakewalk at the elementary school carnival. We ate pizza and put on plays with our cousins in my grandparent's dark basement. We caught fireflies and played with kittens and made mud pottery near the creek under the viaduct in summer and sledded and made snow forts in the winter. It's either blazing hot or freezing cold in Iowa all the time, so I don't remember spring and fall. Maybe they didn't exist.

As I got older, we watched The Muppet Show or The Dukes of Hazzard on Friday nights with the couches pushed together and lots of popcorn. I remember spilling soda on the carpet a lot. A LOT. (I hope that part of family entertainment doesn't become my reality -- can I make my girl use sippy cups until she leaves home?)

We also went to movies a lot -- probably twice a month. I loved going to the movies with my family, but I hated how they always made us get there at least a half-hour early. We'd take books and freeze until the curtain dropped. My family does everything early. If my parents had their way, they would leave for the airport the day before the flight. I don't remember which movies we saw, but they were never R rated. The PG-13 rating came out before I reached the age of 13, and I think my law-abiding mother respected it until my sister turned 13, three years after I did. I remember best seeing Splash.

My current version of family entertainment is so much more diverse than my childhood experiences, mostly because we live in Kansas City, where (surprise!) there is a lot to do. We have access to Worlds of Fun, which was a huge, yearly weekend trip for us as kids and is now a whim half-hour drive for my husband, daughter and me, especially if we do the half-price Twilight Hours. We go to children's museums, art museums, science exhibits, Science City, and Union Station, as well as tons of indoor places with tunnels and video games and ball pits in the winter. We go to the zoo, the lake, swimming pools, carnivals, festivals, air shows, water parks and outdoor theaters in the summer.

We almost never go to the movies, and we seldom watch television as a family. In fact, the only television my daughter has watched this summer is the half-hour of cartoons she gets in the morning while we get ready for work. I realized this summer she is probably old enough to watch stuff like Dancing With the Stars or American Idol, let alone Hannah Montana or the Wizards of Waverly Place, but then I thought -- nah. Why do that now when there's SO MUCH TIME for that later?

I asked myself if I thought family entertainment is better or worse now than it was when I was a kid. I actually think it's better. The animated movies are amazing, poignant and vivid. The amusement parks are safer and more geared toward all ages. The face paint doesn't itch as much and the dress-up clothes are way better. There are at least 37 kinds of Crayola products that didn't exist when I was wielding crayons regularly. And the peachy color isn't called "flesh" anymore -- hello? How could we have ever thought that was acceptable to people of color?

That's the other thing I prefer about entertainment now. We're not totally where we need to be, but there are a lot more not white characters on television and in the movies. The last time I checked, most dolls still come in "black" and "white" -- mostly "white" -- but thanks to Dora and Handy Manny Spanish flows back and forth with English in cartoons and that totally racist centaur thing has disappeared from Fantasia. These facts alone to me mean we've improved. There's always nostalgia for the old days, but I'm glad I don't have to worry about my kid growing up listening to Archie Bunker hurl racial epithets. Entertainment can be damaging, because kids accept it as truth.

The thing I miss about family entertainment? I don't spend as much time with extended family as I did growing up, and neither does my girl. Time with grandparents and cousins is a special occasion, not the norm. We all just live too far apart. She has a different relationship with her cousins than I did with mine. It's not necessarily worse, but it's less familiar. We don't spend weekends at family dinners. As a result, when I think "family," I usually think of our little three-unit nuclear.

But on the flip side, I get a lot of weekend evening time with just my girl and my guy, and I'll always treasure our cookouts in the backyard watching my daughter and her neighborhood posse drift back and forth shooting each other with bubble guns and shrieking when the fat little neighbor dog wandered into the fray.

What are your childhood memories of family time? How is your current reality different?

CDC: Keep Your Sick Kid Home. Your Boss: Get Your Butt to Work.

2009-09-07T06:00:00-05:00

It's almost here: flu season, swine or otherwise. As always, the media is seizing on the opportunity to scream PANDEMIC WE WILL ALL DIE, but the truth beneath the hype is this: 'Tis the season for a virus.

Nobody likes taking care of a sick kid. It's stressful. It's hard. It often makes you sick, too. And if you're a working parent, you get to add the stress of your employer and your childcare provider breathing down your neck to the hell cocktail of feverish children, doctor's appointments, pharmacies and healthcare coverage.

The CDC says:

If you are sick, you may be ill for a week or longer. You should stay home and keep away from others as much as possible, including avoiding travel and not going to work or school, for at least 24 hours after your fever is gone except to get medical care or for other necessities.

Hmm. A week or longer. Not going to work or school. RIIIIIGGHHHT.

I remember my daughter's first year of daycare. She contracted four childhood diseases along with the normal colds and viruses. She spiked a temperature of 105 degrees one night, which nearly gave me a heart attack. Many times I had to call the emergency nanny and pay more than I would earn that day to ensure someone could stay with her after I ran out of sick days. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was leave my sick baby with someone I didn't even know. But it was that or lose the job that helped put formula in her bottle and diapers on her rear and a roof over her head.

Even more fun? Getting to work and knowing people were probably wondering exactly how much time I was planning to miss that year and still get paid the same as them. And I understood their point of view. It looked like I was abusing the system, crying "sick kid" and "doctor's appointments" almost every week -- because I was.

My kid was sick all the time her first year in daycare.

I spent most of that year a defensive, angry wreck, and my daughter's health played a big part of that. Every time she was sick, I liked my job less. I liked daycare less. I liked myself less as her mother who couldn't keep all the balls in the air. I felt like a failure at my job and as a mother, and the constant discussions over who was going to take off work or find alternate arrangements to get to the doctor's office wasn't exactly helping my marriage, either.

I identified with this part of Heather's post at Pittsburgh Mom:

My husband is traveling more so he often isn't in town to take off if the kids are sick. it's up to me much of the time. And we have no family in town that could take our kids in an emergency. Our stay-at-home mom friends don't want to watch my sick kids (obviously) for fear of their children catching something. Understandable.

Suffice it to say I'm not enjoying the reports about upcoming swine flu situation. The regular flu is enough to make my delicately balanced work/school/childcare situation fall apart like the house of cards it is.

The worst part? I am one of the lucky ones. I have the ability to work from home, sick days AND health insurance. What about parents who don't even have paid time off?

Katie Bethell writes at MomsRising:

If the Secretary Duncan wants to offer real help and support to parents, he should publicly support the Healthy Families Act. This Act will allow working people to earn paid sick days that they can use to care for themselves or their children when they are sick. Paid Sick Days not only benefit families, they also save businesses money by keeping workers healthy and productive.

(More on MomsRising's petition for paid sick time here.)

Beverly Goldberg writes at Taking Note:

But the question is what alternatives are available, especially to a single parent who works at a low-paid job, especially the kind of job that does not offer sick days? (And even if a job offers a limited number of sick days, most parents use them to take care of their child and then, having contracted the illness from the child, they feel compelled to make it in to work while sick themselves.) What if the costs of hiring someone to look after the child cannot be met? What if there are no nearby family members to ask for help? There has been little follow-up to Sibelius’s recommendation, probably because there is no real solution for most parents who have neither the means nor support systems to cover such contingencies.

Though I'd love to blame a lack of paid sick time on evil employers, it's often small businesses who don't offer paid sick time, and that's because either a) they don't have anyone to cover for an absent employee or b) they can't afford it on such a small scale. Employers understand how much the situation damages their employees' ability to be productive.

According to Paul Gallagher of Human Resource Executive Online:

"I think it's an important [issue] for employers, because if [parents] are worrying about their children and the care of their children while they're at work because they're not able to take time off, then that's something that I think employers really need to take a good look at, because they may not be getting the best out of their employees," she says.

It's a tough lot, all around. I don't know how to fix it, but I'm not excited about riding the wave.