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Is text-messaging the end of civilization?
Dory Devlin, a tech blogger for Yahoo (and a friend of mine), wrote an interesting piece about the trend of teens spending more of their time text-messaging than actually talking on the phone.
There has been a lot of chest beating as of late about how kids will lose their ability to speak well if they don't spend more time actually engaged in one-on-one conversation. My kids are not teens yet (though my 10-year-old has been lobbying me for a cell phone for the past few months). But my feeling is, this may be just another case of the older generation fretting about the darn things kids do.
Was it really much better that I spent hours--and I do mean hours--chatting away on the telephone when I was 13 years old? I wasted my time talking about the same kinds of inanities that teens spout when they text message today. Let's not romanticize the past. Teens are teens are teens. r u listening?
 Stumble It!
The "Food Police" Deconstructed
Came back from a long weekend in the country to an alarming New York Times headline, "Well-Intentioned Food Police May Create Havoc with Children's Diets." In the essay, Harriet Brown makes the provocative--but ultimately unconvincing--argument that schools are banning peanuts and sweets in a misguided reaction to the obesity epidemic.
Sure, she says, some kids can have deathly allergic reactions to peanuts but kids have berry allergies too, and the "food police" isn't trying to ban strawberries!
Evidently, the author doesn't know any parents whose kids have nut allergies because if she did, she'd know that berry allergies aren't usually life-threatening as nut allergies can be. She'd also know that it's not the fat-hating food police pushing for the bans on nuts--but parents deathly worried that their kids will have a horrible allergic reaction, and school nurses, who rightly fear that a terrible accident could occur on their watch.
As for her argument that limiting junk food in schools is part of a fear of fat and will just make kids want the forbidden, it seems to me that she is ignoring the fact that most parents today grew up with far fewer sweets in the schools.
Why is it that preschools and elementary schools today feel the need to mark every holiday (and non-holiday) with brownies, cookies, and other sugary treats for the kids? I have a five-year-old preschooler and a 10-year-old. It is astounding to me how often these kids are given cookies and candies in class. It's Shabbat? Treats for everyone. A class play? More treats. My 10-year-old daughter even gets a treat from her piano teacher at the end of every lesson.
I'm not worried about my kids getting fat--but I am concerned about them conflating fun and rewards with sugary junk. Aren't there other ways to give kids encouragement or congratulate them for a job well done?
But back to the New York Times story. It seems the writer came to her conclusions after her kid's school sent home a notice saying the school would only give kids one slice of pizza at lunch, not two. Exactly why, or what motivated, this particular school to take this action is unclear; how many other schools have done this, the writer doesn't say. (My guess is very, very few.) That, however, doesn't stop her from drawing all kinds of conclusions from an incident, which probably is a red herring. Harriet, I think you missed the boat on this one.
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The "Special Needs" Epidemic
Is it just my New Jersey neighborhood, or does there seem to be an increase in the number of parents who are eager to see their kids labeled as special needs?
This is what some of my friends and I are discussing as we're each seeing parents we know insisting that their kids are "borderline" fill-in-the-blank disorder. What it seems to us--after supervising umpteen play dates and eating how-many-family-dinners together--is that many of these kids are perfectly normal. They just have parents who won't, or can't, say no.
Now, no one is going to name me parent of the year, either, nor do I think my kids are saints. And I certainly know plenty of kids who have very real disorders ,and I do not want to in any way minimize the challenge of dealing with that. But in most cases, the parents of these kids really, desperately wished that their child didn't receive that diagnosis.
So why are some parents--whose kids, for the most part, function pretty well, except at home when they're obnoxious, oppositional, and rule the roost---eager to label their kids as special needs? In some cases even seeking special provisions from the schools?
I know the popular theory is that they just want to help their kids get an unfair edge. I'm wondering if there is something else at work that is causing parents to tell anyone who will listen how their child is "borderline" ADD.
Is this what people did in the 1950s when psychoanalysis and Freudian theory filtered into the mainstream.? Labeled themselves or relatives as "hysterics" or suffering from the "Oedipal complex" when in fact, they were just selfish or bored? Have we been so inundated with information about autism, ADHD, auditory processing disorder, and sensory integration disorder (forgive me if I'm getting these terms wrong) that we're using these terms to explain away our kids' behavior?
Stumble It!
TV isn't the bane of our existence
A new study was released yesterday showing that one out of three children under the age of six have a TV in their bedroom, and some kids are falling asleep to a blaring TV.
Stanley Greenspan, among other experts, was quoted in The New York Times lamenting the fact that parents use TV as a "babysitter" and clucking about how parents just don't grasp how damaging it is to kids.
While I didn't allow my kids to watch TV when they were under the age of 2, and I think parking a kid of any age in front of a TV for hours is a really bad thing for lots of reasons, I was annoyed by sanctimonious tone of these experts' comments .
Greenspan pioneered the concept of floor time as a way to treat autistic kids--the idea was that parents should get on their floor and "engage" their kids. But he's also been evangelizing for floortime for parents of all kids. Fine enough--he gets paid for doing floortime. And he has a knack for it and probably enjoys it, which is why he is making a living doing it.
But how are the rest of us supposed to follow suit when we have 1) laundry 2) dinner to cook 3) other kids who have homework 4) a household to run? Not to mention that some of us (okay me) find playing Barbies or Candyland for the hundredth time something akin to water torture. (Drip drip. When will this end?)
In fact, find me a parent who does NOT resort to the TV as a babysitter at times, and I'll find you a parent with a full time nanny or grandma who babysits. Or someone heavily medicated. Or someone who yells A LOT.
Stumble It!
To Co-Sleep Or Not to Co-Sleep
Dr. Richard Ferber, the pediatrician who wrote the 1985 classic, Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, has done a flip flop. In a new edition of his book, he no longer argues that parents should not sleep with their kids. According to Newsweek, Dr. Ferber now is taking a live-and-let-live stance on the issue. "Whatever you want to do, whatever you feel comfortable doing, is the right thing to do, as long as it works," he writes.
All I can say is, better late than never.
Yes, I've read the articles about the dangers of co-sleeping--Child magazine ran a really thorough piece on the issue last year. But for some parents and kids, co-sleeping has tremendous benefits and can be done safely and responsibly. I'm tired of "experts" issuing dogmatic pronouncements based on their own personal views, whether that's advocating for or against co-sleeping, toilet training at 18 months, or the right age to wean kids off pacifiers.
We didn't co-sleep with my first daughter, even though I was nursing her. And we had her sleeping through the night by the time she was three months old. But when we adopted our younger daughter from an orphanage, she was six months old. I felt strongly--and instinctively--that we needed to be sleeping together. I wanted her to learn my smell and vice versa; I wanted to ease whatever psychic pain she had and felt, rightly or wrongly, that sleeping beside her would let her know that I was there for her. The thought of putting her in a strange room, alone, seemed wrong--especially since she had spent the first six months sleeping in a room surrounded by other kids.
Having worshipped at Dr. Ferber's altar with my first daughter, I was worried, though, that I might be doing the wrong thing. Fortunately, I asked for the advice of Dr. Jane Aronson, a wonderful pediatrician I was using then, who specializes in adoption medicine. She essentially gave me a shoulder shrug, saying it was a person decision and really depended on whether both parents were comfortable with it.
If it works for both of you, she said, it works.
Her words were a relief then, and I imagine Dr. Ferber's new thinking will be the same for many parents. What it should tell us is that so much of the "expert" advice isn't based on hard science, but subjective opinions. And maybe that will stop us from judging each other's parenting so much --- but that's another posting.
Stumble It!
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