FilmPossible, Grandparent Care, and Teen Brains

FILMPOSSIBLE

Holland Bloorview is putting a call out to budding film-makers to enter filmpossible, a unique online video contest which will showcase the possibilities for children living with disabilities.

Film-makers have until Aug. 31 to submit their videos.

"Filmpossible is a unique opportunity for film-makers to dispel myths, perhaps by showcasing achievements or showing changes we can make," says Christa Haanstra, Senior Director, Communications and Public Affairs. "By entering this contest, you can help Holland Bloorview change the way the world views childhood disability."

I don't know about you, but I love the idea of this contest: putting the focus on the possible. After all, the world tends to do quite the opposite when your child is diagnosed with a disability: focusing on what may no longer be possible (at least according to some study or statistic). To find out how to enter, what you could win (yes, there are all kinds of fabulous prizes), and how the entries will be judged, visit the project's website, filmpossible.ca.

GRANDPARENT CARE

A recent article by BBC News education reporter Katharine Sellgren noted that the UK is lagging behind other European countries by failing to recognize the important role that grandparents play in providing childcare. (One in three mothers in the UK relies on her children's grandparents to provide childcare.)

According to Sellgren, steps taken by other EU countries to assist grandparents in providing care to their grandchildren included "allow [ing] parents to transfer parental leave to grandparents, letting working grandparents take time off if their grandchild is sick and, in some circumstances, paying them for the care they provided." (via Workplace Flexibility 2010.org). 

TEEN BRAINS

"One of the big discoveries [about adolescent health] has been about brain development. During adolescence there’s a massive pruning of the synapses [neural connections] of the brain, and this process doesn’t really stop until around age 24. And the last part of the brain to develop is the prefrontal cortex, which helps us in cognitive thought and making good decisions in our behavior. So that partially explains why teenagers are sort of known worldwide for their risk-taking behavior."
- Center for Adolescent Health director Freya Sonenstein, PhD, Director of the Center for Adolescent Health at the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, quoted in the current issue of John Hopkins Public Health Magazine.

Note: The Center for Adolescent Health has just published a guide to adolescent health entitled The Teen Years Explained. You can download a copy of the book (in .pdf format).

Dear Lemon Lima: The Short Film - A Review

If your experience of being 12 or 13 was anything like mine, you don't need a film like Dear Lemon Lima to help you to understand what adolescence can be like for a kid who is socially awkward, a loner, and/or a bit of a geek. That time in your own life now represents your own personal benchmark for hell.

If, however, you have nothing but fond memories of the years when you reigned as Queen of the Sleepover Circuit or King of the Street Hockey League – and you can't understand why your 12-year-old is more the reclusive caterpillar than the social butterfly – you may want to watch the short film Dear Lemon Lima with your preteen or teen.

Dear Lemon Lima | Artvoice TV

Available for download on iTunes for $1.99, Dear Lemon Lima is a short film (11:54) about bouncing back after first heartbreak with Mr. Oh-So-Wrong (a 12-year-old who acts like a graduate of a soul-extracting franchise management program) and finding true friendship (with other kids who are marching to the sound of their own drummer).

The movie is funny and charming; and it provides a natural launching pad for conversations about what it's like to be a creative or sensitive person in a sometimes unthinking or unfeeling world: how it takes courage to walk that path, but how much easier that journey becomes once you find a community of like-minded souls to share the journey with.

The world can be a terribly lonely place when you're a square-peg 12 year old stuck in a classroom of round-peg kids: you need to know that there are triangular- and rectangular- and octagonal- and, yes, even square-peg kids waiting to meet you in the land of high school and beyond. You're only 12 for 365 days, after all, even if it feels like it lasts forever.

Note: Don't confuse the short film Dear Lemon Lima (11:54, released 2010, which filmmaker Suzi Yoonessi made as her thesis film while completing Columbia University's Graduate Film program) with the feature film Dear Lemon Lima (87 minutes, 2009, also directed by Yoonessi, but with a different tone and flavor).

The Worst Moms: What is it With Our Fascination With The Underbelly of Motherhood?

Oh how the Internet loves its lists. It particularly loves lists of the awful, the bizarre, and the outrageous. And if those lists of the worst of the worst happen to feature celebrities and/or people who could be your next door neighbor behaving badly, well, all the better, it would seem.

So it's hardly surprising that lists (or video clips) of parents doing incredibly stupid things have become an online phenomenon.

The "worst moms" genre appears to be particularly popular, highlighting the dubious achievements of all kinds of moms: fictional, famous, and newly infamous. Time Magazine's list of the Best and Worst Moms Ever draws from the world of entertainment and features Mrs. Robinson and The Mother from Pink Floyd's The Wall. Meanwhile, Momlogic.com's list of the 10 Worst Moms in History includes the wolf spider (infamous for eating its young). And Bookfinder.com's list of the 10 Worst Mothers in Literature features scary fairy-tale moms and freaky horror-novel moms alike.

So what types of sins against motherhood have these moms, real and imaginary, committed in order to score a mention on one of these lists? Everything from maternal disinterest to being too sexy to not having the perfect family to behaving like a garden-variety sociopath (or worse).

And what is it that fuels the fascination with the worst of the worst? A little homegrown parenting anxiety, perhaps?

As MomLogic.com Teresa Strasser columnist noted in the introduction to her feature, The 10 Worst Moms in History, "At seven months pregnant, coming up with this kind of list makes me feel better about my own mom potential. Thank you for lowering the bar, worst moms in history."

When You and Your Partner Don't See Eye-to-Eye About Parenting

Being married can be challenging enough. Add kids to the mix and sometimes couples reach the breaking point. (For other couples, the parent piece is the only non-broken part of a couple relationship that was in trouble long before the kids come along.)

I have life after baby on my mind for a couple of reasons.

First, I spent my weekend speaking at the Winnipeg Baby and Kids Show, which gave me the opportunity to chat informally with a large number of parents about the biggest challenges they are facing in their lives as parents. Many mentioned feeling out of synch with their partners about the decisions they were making as parents.

Secondly, I just finished watching the documentary Married in America 2 (available for purchase via iTunes and elsewhere). The film catches up with nine couples who were the subjects of the original Married in America documentary to find out how they are faring individually and as couples as their relationships hit the five-year mark.

Some of the couples have had a baby; others are thinking about having kids. Some are grappling with deaths in the family or the complexities of blended family issues. Some couples are together; others are not. They all have different perspectives on life and relationships than they did five years earlier, some for better and some for worse.

The documentary is definitely worth watching. The film is fun and fast-moving and each of the couples is uniquely fascinating. My only quibble is that we never get a chance to see the couples arguing (something that does tend to happen in real life). No one swears on camera either. Ever. Perhaps the film was edited to make the film more palatable to faith groups (for marriage preparation courses) and educational organizations (for parenting classes). Or perhaps the folks at the Hallmark Channel (where the film initially aired) has rules about real life getting a little too real.

- - -

But back to the broader issue: coping with problems in your couple relationship after you have kids; or, more specifically, what to do if you and your partner don't see eye-to-eye about how to raise your kids.

Here are some points to consider.

Don't assume that the problem will take care of itself once the baby is no longer a baby, the toddler is no longer a toddler, etc. You've still got a lot of years of parenting ahead of you -- and you definitely want to be on the same page of the parenting playbook by the time your kids hit the preteen or teen stage.

Try to engage your partner in a heart-to-heart discussion about the hopes and dreams that led you to want to become parents in the first place: the types of parents you want to be and the types of kids you want to raise. If you've never had this type of conversation, there's no time like the present to have it. Try to have this conversation when you're both relaxed and in a positive and upbeat mood. If you can't have this type of conversation without the conversation dissolving into an argument, consider couples therapy (so that you can work on your communication skills and resolve the outstanding issues you have as parents and as a couple).

Consider taking a parenting course together. That way, the information you're trying to discuss with your partner will be reaching your partner via a neutral third-party rather than always being filtered through you.

Share parenting materials that you've found particularly helpful. And encourage your partner to share parenting materials that express his or her ideas about parenting, too. (You don't have to agree with all the viewpoints expressed. What you're trying to do is get an understanding of what your partner is thinking and feeling about a particular issue. That's the first step to talking the issue through and finding some common ground.)

Take stock of all the things you do agree about rather than just focusing on all the things you don't. Then find ways to build on that common foundation in your lives as parents.

Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids: Review of Documentary (Airs on CBC Next Week)

The Art of Parenting

Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids zeroes in on what is commonly referred to as helicopter parenting: the tendency of some parents to hover over their kids. (Did you know that helicopter parents are known as curling parents in Sweden? That's one of the interesting pop culture tidbits that you can pick up while watching this documentary.)

The documentary describes the phenomenon in detail and features interviews with parents, a psychiatrist, and other cultural commentators, including Carl Honore, author of Under Pressure: Rescuing our Children from the Culture of Over-Parenting. Notably absent is Lorene Skenazy, whose book Free Range Kids is widely considered to be the unofficial manifesto of the anti-helicopter parenting movement.

The documentary is at its best when it focuses on the lives of kids who are heading off to university or landing their first job. According to a variety of sources who are interviewed on camera, hardcore helicopter parenting types apparently think nothing of calling up their kids university profs (or the president of the university) to argue about grades; or of making contact with their kids' employers, if junior's performance review hasn't been sufficiently glowing.

The documentary is less convincing when it focuses on the lives of the over-privileged (parents who can afford to drop $4000 on birthday bash for a one year old) or the just-plain-clueless (parents who don't seem to be able to think critically about any product or service that promises to give their kid an advantage over the next family's kid). Very few parents bought into the helicopter parenting phenomenon to this degree, even when the trend was at its peak. Becoming a parent isn't correlated with a sudden increase in wealth or an immediate loss of your critical thinking abilities, after all.

There's also the issue of timeliness. This documentary would have been more timely a few years back, when parents were more inclined to want to micromanage their kids' lives. Since that time, there has been a growing backlash against helicopter parenting. The recession has accelerated this trend by giving parents something else to worry about (finding the money to pay the bills) and reducing the income available to fund that faux-perfect family lifestyle.

Since environmental concerns heightened and the recession hit, parents have been simplifying their lives (including managing the avalanche of parenting advice information that can leave them feeling helicopter-parented by the parenting experts), simplifying their kids lives (allowing lots of time for unstructured outdoor play: an old-fashioned idea that never quite went out of style), and enjoying time as a family (relaxed time for fun, not time that is driven by an agenda). And I can tell you one thing. No one is eager to hop back on board that helicopter anytime soon.

The documentary is worth watching, if only as a reminder of where we've been and how far we've come in rejecting the consumerist parenting style that views parents as manufacturers and kids as products to be paraded before the neighbors and the relatives. They are individuals in their own right: not branch plants belonging to Mom or Dad Inc.

Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids airs at the following times:

Thursday, February 4, 2010 at 9 pm on CBC-TV

Friday, February 5, 2010 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC News Network.

The Box in the Basement

The past doesn't stay neatly stored away in a box in your basement, as much as you might like it to. All kinds of events can cause your mind to wander downstairs and start poking through the contents of that box, long after you'd sworn you'd hammered down the lid for good.

Last night I watched Awful Normal, a powerful documentary by Celeste Davis (available through iTunes). Perhaps you've seen it. It documents the filmmaker's decision to confront a family friend who sexually abused her and her sister a quarter-century earlier. The result is a powerful testament to the way childhood sexual abuse impacts everyone involved; and how powerfully children are affected when they are forced to pretend that everything is okay -- or "normal," to borrow from the film's title – when it's anything but.

As parents, we teach our kids that feelings are important: that they have a right to their feelings, no matter what those feelings may be, and that their feelings will help to guide them through life. When children are told to ignore what they are really feeling and to behave in a way that feels abnormal or wrong in order to meet the needs of an adult, they start second-guessing the feelings that have been guiding them so intuitively until now. Should they listen to their own feelings or should they listen to the adult voice in their head that is trying to over-rule those feelings? Which voice should they trust? Which voice should they obey? What happens to that child when they realize that the voice of the adult is misguided or wrong; and that they have to look out for themselves? How does that feel?

So overwhelming that you may not even register the degree of overwhelm at the time.

Navigating Normal (or a Reasonable Facsimile Thereof)

It's when you're making heartfelt, conscious choices about raising your own children, thinking about what they're feeling and the choices you want to make as you move from one parenting stage to the next, that you remember what it was like to be that kid.

The lid on the box in the basement can start to wriggle off. The box can begin to block your view of the people sitting across from you at the dinner table.

The first step, for me, in trying to starting to deal with the box was to make peace with the person and the times. My mother's health problems (she was severely affected by bipolar disorder) prevented her from being the kind of mother she tried so desperately to be (connected, nurturing, calm, happy, involved). And the seventies were, after all, anything but the age of enlightenment when it came to speaking openly about mental illness, let alone confronting its impact on the children of a mother who was really struggling.

The next step involved making sense of the major events that occurred during my childhood and adolescent years and how I reacted to them: the choices I made and how each affected the person I became.

I'm now in the life reno phase. Using architecture as a model, I've started rebuilding some parts of the house that are going to need a powerful foundation if this building is going to weather the sunshine and storms of the next 45 years. (I just turned 46 and my two grandmothers each lived into their mid-90s or beyond. That's the goal I've set for myself: to thrive into my 90s.)

I've become much more proactive about managing stress because stress is a trigger for the seasonal affective disorder and the bouts of depression that I've struggled with in the past.

I've become much more effective at advocating for myself. (I honed these skills while advocating for my kids – just one of the many gifts motherhood has given to me.) The mere fact that this item didn't show up at the end of my list shows how much progress I've made.

I've confronted my life-long nemesis – the bully in all her assorted forms – and I've put her on notice that she no longer has a place in my life.

I'm doing more of what I love and connecting with all kinds of people who share my passion for making the world a better place for everyone's children.

I'm developing a more holistic view of what it means to be healthy. (I've even finally found a way to work out and have fun at the same time.)

So why am I sharing all this with you? In case you're on a similar path and you'd like some company.

This is, after all, hard work. There are times when it is tempting to haul that box out of the basement and bury it the backyard -- or haul it to the closest dump. But all you'd end up with is an angry replicant of that same box. The only way to neutralize the contents of that box is to work you way through it. Writing and tapping into other creative forms of creative expression can be tremendously helpful as you mentally sort through its contents. So can talking with others who are working through the same process. Ditto for connecting with the right therapist. Doing so helps to normalize the experience by reminding us that very few people have a perfect childhood, just as none of us are perfect parents or flawless human beings.

The more we plug away at this, the clearer we become about who we are and how we want to live our lives. That allows us to feel good about what the future holds for ourselves and kids as we continue to grow together as a family.

I saw an old couple bein' visited by their children
and all their grandchildren too.
The old couple weren't screwed up,
and neither were their kids or their grandkids.

- H.I. McDunnough, Raising Arizona

Best Summer Ever: Day 59

August 28
Become the Poster Parent for the Joy of Learning

One of the most powerful things you can do to raise a child who is is to model that excitement yourself.

You want your child to see you reading books, newspapers, and magazines on a daily basis; researching issues that matter to you; and watching documentaries on topics that you are passionate about.

With you as a living example of the joy of learning, how can your child help but get the message that learning is something that takes place anytime, anywhere; and that it continues throughout your entire life?

Image: Created using the motivator tool at BigHugeLabs.com.

Best Summer Ever: Day 45

August 15
Get Your Daily Dose of Funny

Load up on funny stuff at the library.

Laughter is an essential daily nutrient for parents and kids alike.

Related:

The Children's Hospital: Encouraging Your Child's Sense of Humor

Booktrust: The Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2009 and the 2008 site

Kaboose.com: Comedy Movie Reviews

Best Summer Ever: Day 29

July 29
Create a Summer Collage

Create a summer collage using some of the photos you've snapped this summer.

If you're looking for inspiration from other collage lovers, you'll find plenty of collage-related groups on Flickr, including this highly popular collage images group.

Related:

HowStuffWorks: Collage Crafts for Kids

Photo Credit: Ann Douglas, 2009.

Best Summer Ever: Day 27

July 27
Your Top 10 List Revisited....

Think about the top ten things you really wanted to do this summer.

Have you been able to do some of those things -- or has life tossed a few too many curve balls your way? (Hey, it happens.)

What do you plan to do to make the remaining weeks of summer really count, before the crazy-busy month of September catches up with us all?

Photo Credit: Ann Douglas, 2009.