Trouble in Toyland, Short Kids, A School that Could Rock the 21st Century

Newswire

Trouble in Toyland

Innocent companies can get hurt by the backlash that happens following a recall. That's one of the key findings to emerge from a study of the highly publicized 2007 toy recalls. Toy companies who were not affected by the recalls had their sales drop by 25 percent as consumers' confidence in toy products overall spiraled downward. "In this industry, one firm's offence seems to penalize other players," said Mara Lederman, a professor at the Rotman School of Management and one of the study's three co-authors.

Parenting Lab

Short Kids

Parents may worry about kids who are shorter than average, but the experts say the kids are doing just fine. A University of Michigan Health System study found that shorter kids do just as well in terms of popularity, social support, and optimism as their taller peers. It just goes to prove that Randy Newman had it all wrong. 

The Big Idea

School That Could Rock the 21st Century

Students need to master the art of compassion if they're going to be ready to take up the challenges of 21st century citizenship. That means that they should be spending more time acquiring such skills as mindfulness and contemplation (so that they can tune out distractions and focus on what really matters, like meeting the needs of those around them). The current system, which promotes competition rather than cooperation in the classroom, tends to foster inequality and unhappiness. According to Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th dalai lama, who was one of 20 panelists at a recent conference, "Educating World Citizens for the 21st Century," co-sponsored by the American Psychological Association, most people are willing to settle for a definition of education that involves memorizing facts and passing tests, as opposed to contributing to life-long happiness and well-being. "We are social animals," Gyatso told the APA Monitor. "Individuals' happiness depends on the community's happiness."

Mom 2.0: She Has the Power: Moms, Marketers, and Ms. Magazine All Agree About That

Mom 2.0 has been the talk of the online world for much of the past week, with mothers and marketing and PR-types debating the power that Mom 2.0 now wields and how that power should or could be used.

The conversation is likely to continue this week, with another powerful post from blogger Mom-101 and with Ms. Magazine posting a shortened version of its Summer 2009 cover story - Cyberhood is Powerful by Kara Jesella - on its website as of today. The article, by Kara Jesella -- discusses the powerful ways mothers have connected online, for both personal and political reasons. (The extended play version of the story, which you'll find in the print edition, features a more in-depth look at the personal and political aspects of mommyblogging; and includes a useful resource sidebar featuring both mommyblogs and online motherhood resources.)  Note: Ms Magazine made the full-length version of the article available on its website on August 5th.

So why is mommyblogging getting coverage in Ms Magazine? Jesella wisely addresses that question early on in the print edition of the article:

"Not all the mommybloggers might self-define as feminists -- although certainly there is a feminist impulse behind the avowed goal of many of them to change cultural perceptions of motherhood -- but one might argue that what they're doing is a virtual version of feminist consciousness-raising: They're being exceedingly open about their experiences of mothering, and sharing those experiences in an (online) community with other mothers."

The mommyblogger conversation continues elsewhere as well. The Association for Research on Mothering's recently-published book Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog, edited by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte (Demeter Press, May 2009) picks up where Jesella's article leaves off, mining mommyblogging territory that isn't often written about: what do we make of blogs that document the lives of celebrity mothers and babies? which mothers end up getting marginalized in the momosphere (or mamasphere) -- and why? how does the presence of marketers affect conversations between mothers? and how are blogs evolving as more user-generated content and Web 2.0 technologies become available to moms (everything from Facebook to Twitter to Flickr to the huge number of social-networking communities aimed at moms and/or parents).

Related:

Excerpts from my essay "Mom 2.0: Meet the Mommyblogger," published in Mothering and Blogging: The Radical Act of the MommyBlog, edited by May Friedman and Shana L. Calixte (Demeter Press, May 2009).

Best Summer Ever: Day 14

July 14
Buy Yourself Some Free Time

Hire a teenager to help you to catch up on laundry, housework, and the long list of jobs that never seem to get done.

Find a way to use the time you've freed up in a way that will nurture your relationships and allow you to do some of the things you want to do, both for yourself and as a family.

Related:

Take Back Your Time: A U.S./Canadian initiative that seeks to "challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment."

Here are a few noteworthy points excerpted from the Take Back Your Time website:

     Time stress threatens our marriages, families and relationships as we find less time for each other, less time to care for our children and elders, less time to just hang out. 
     It weakens our communities. We have less time to know our neighbors, supervise our young people, and volunteer. 
     It reduces employment as fewer people are hired and then required to work longer hours, or are hired for poor part-time jobs without benefits. 
     It leaves many of us with little time to vote, much less be informed, active citizens. 
     It leaves us little time for ourselves, for self-development, or for spiritual growth. 
     It even contributes to the destruction of our environment. Studies show that lack of time encourages use of convenience and throwaway items and reduces recycling.

Photo Credit: Ann Douglas, 2009.

Best Summer Ever: Day 1

July 1
Happy Birthday, Canada!

Play Gordon Lightfoot's Canadian Railroad Trilogy, eat red-and-white foods (strawberries with ice cream or a cake inspired by this design), and find other fun ways to celebrate Canada's birthday.

Related:

Best Summer Ever Series (63 Days, 63 Tips): Make This Summer Really Count for Yourself and Your Family: Over the next 63 days, I will be featuring a tip a day for parents who are hoping to make this summer really count for themselves and their families.

O, Canada! 7 Sensational Ways to Bring History to Life for Your Kids: Tips on making history come alive for your kids in fun and fabulous ways.

Mom and Pop Psychology: Let's Get Quizzical

Surprise! It's time for a parenting pop quiz -- circa 1936.

We may give credit to Cosmo for giving birth to the famous (or infamous) quizzes that have become the magazine’s trademark. Truth is, while Cosmo has been publishing its quizzes for at least 37 years, Guardian media columnist Lynn Peril managed to uncover a pop quiz for parents published in 1936 (by the American magazine Delineator).

Here are Peril’s comments on what must have been an extraordinarily guilt-inducing quiz: 76 questions on the theme: "How Good a Parent Are You?"

The quiz...asked a gruelling 76 questions from "Do you make scenes in public places?" to "Do you sneak castor oil into his orange juice?" with A being the highest possible rating. The answer key sneered at anyone who scored so high though. "Only doting aunts, uncles, grandparents are this good," it chided. Getting a B was preferable ("No wonder your neighbours' offspring envy yours"), but then things slid downhill to F ("Don't blame them if they run away.")

Let's do the time warp again....

Just in case that quiz left you itching to try your hand at the modern-day equivalent of this kind of quiz, I've rounded up a few examples. Just bear in mind that these quizzes are anything but scientific and that subtlety is not their greatest strength. Be sure to tell your therapist I warned you.

What Is Your Parenting Style?

What's Your Celebrity Mom Personality?

Whose Your Hollywood Pregnancy Double?

What's Your Animal Mother Style?

Are You A Terrible Mother?

Are You A Great Mother?

Are You a Helicopter Parent?

What Kind of Mom Are You?

Care to share your reactions to any of the questions that caught your attention from the quizzes above -- or any other parenting quizzes you've encountered over the years? Want to try your hand at writing a parenting quiz of your own (serious or satire - your pick)? Post it on your blog and post the link below so we can find out whether we're marvelous or miserable, perfect or persnickety - or whatever.

This non-helicopter blogger is @anndouglas on Twitter.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Rule Number 1 - Put the Kids First

One of my best friends married Mr. Freeze.

I knew before they got married that he was wrong for her. (She’s as warm and bubbly as he is emotionally cold and distant.)

I knew, even as I watched them take their vows, that this wouldn’t end well.

Things didn’t improve when baby one or baby two came along, so I was happy and relieved when she announced she was exiting the refrigerator marriage and starting over as a single mom.

I may never think much of her ex, but her kids don’t need to know this. He will always be their dad. Besides, if my friend can treat him civilly in front of the kids, the least I can do is follow her lead. It is a million times more difficult for her than it is for me. I don't ever have to talk to him or see him ever again. She has to have regular contact with him for the rest of her life because he will always be her kids' dad.

I admire my friend for taking the high road. She wants to minimize the fallout of the marriage breakup on her kids, and she’s heard horror stories about angry couples using their kids as weapons to get back at one another, forgetting that it’s the kids who end up getting hurt. They call it parental alienation and the techniques that some parents use are nothing short of Machiavellian. Susan Pigg has an article about the phenomenon that documents the techniques in today's Toronto Star (posted here @ ParentCentral.ca as well). Here are a few of the examples she uncovered:

"There are no pictures that include you in your ex-spouses' house, which is meant to give the child the message that you no longer exist and they shouldn't be thinking about you.

"Interfering with communication: You get hung up on and your letters and gifts aren't passed on to your child. This is especially damaging for parents who live too far away for frequent face-t-face outings, making that contact especially important.

"Your child is being told highly personal information about you, aimed at diminishing you in their eyes: 'Mommy did drugs in high school.' 'Your dad is too small.'"

The breakup of a marriage is always a painful thing, and its even more painful when kids are involved. But it doesn’t have to be the stuff of which celebrity tabloid stories are made. If both parents put their shared love of their children at the forefront and commit to a few basic ground rules, the kids don’t have to become casualties in a battle between the most important people in their lives.

• Not bashing one another. Each parent should treat the other parent with respect, no matter what.
• Not competing with one another to be the most popular parent. A competition to out-spend or to be the good-guy parent will result in a lose-lose-lose situation. Everybody loses.
• Continuing to co-parent. Do what you’ve always done about big-picture parenting decisions: consult one another and work together cooperatively for the good of the kids. 
• Not asking the kids to make impossible choices. Studies have shown that, in most cases, children wish to maintain relationships with both parents. Being asked to choose between parents is to ask kids to make an impossible and painful choice.

Related:

How to Divorce and Not Wreck the Kids

Because Life Goes On...Helping Children and Youth Live With Separation and Divorce

Children and Divorce

Engaging The Whole Child in Learning

 “Holistic education engages the head, heart, hands and spirit of the child.
It is a curriculum that makes connections –
community, earth, soul, subject and mind-and-body connections –
and it develops intuition and inquiry.”

- From the curriculum documents for The Whole Child School,
a Toronto District School Board
alternative school which opens this fall

The parents who received phone calls telling them that their children had secured spots in The Whole Child School reacted as if they had won the lottery. And, as it turns out, they had. Demand for spaces in the new school  was so great that the school had to conduct a lottery to allocate spaces as fairly as possible, says Shari Walczak, a mother of two who has been serving as parent co-chair of the school’s organizing committee.

When The Whole Child School opens its doors this September, it will start out with seven classes: three combined JK/SK classes (Walczak’s 4-year-old son will be in one of those classes); full classes at the Grades 1, 2, and 3 level; and a combined Grade 4/5 class. The school will grow with its students, eventually offering classes from JK through Grade 8.

It isn’t difficult to see what has attracted students to this publicly-funded alternative school. The Whole Child School (which will be sharing space with Roden Public School in the Gerrard and Coxwell neighborhood) will be following a holistic curriculum that has been developed by a highly skilled team of educators, with input from Professor John P. Miller of the Department of Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto.

One of the key challenges that the school’s founders foresee will be managing parent expectations. No school is perfect--even if the curriculum documents make The Whole Child School sound like a learning paradise on earth. What the Whole Child School community can promise to do is be open to learning from the mistakes that will inevitably be made as the school gets through its novice year. “We’ll be learning and adjusting and changing as we go.”

Walczak and other members of the organizing committee are counting on The Whole Child School’s parent community to play a hands-on role in shaping the school during this first, formative year. “We’re looking for a real time commitment and involvement level from our parents. We want them to be involved with everything from fundraising and identifying potential partnerships to providing input on the curriculum and vision.”

If all goes well, The Whole Child School could end up serving as a model for the kind of education every child should be receiving in order to be able to meet the challenges of the future, says Walczak. “We would love for The Whole Child School to become the norm for all children down the road.”

"Holistic education is an effort to cultivate the development of the whole human being.  Where conventional schooling views the child as a passive receiver of information and rules, or at most as a computer-like processor of information, a holistic approach recognizes that to become a full person, a growing child needs to develop – in addition to intellectual skills – physical, psychological, emotional, interpersonal, moral and spirited potentials.  The child is not merely a future citizen or employee in training, but an intricate and delicate web of vital forces and environmental influences."

- Ron Miller, one of the major thinkers and contributors
to the field of holistic education, on the role holistic education
has to play in the development of the whole child,
quoted on The Whole Child School website

Dummy Mummies, Baby Crazies, and Reasons Not to Have Children: It’s Open Season on Mom....Again

The Guardian slams all things parental (and blames all things maternal) in its weekend magazine

A British parent looking for a relaxing read over a cup of tea this past Sunday morning was in for a bit of a jolt. What was being served up in the Life & Style section of The Guardian was a triple-header of parental condemnation, with the bulk of the blame being pinned on mom.

ONE.
In The dummy mummy decade: boring, selfish smug: how a generation of women because obsessed with motherhood, Rachel Cooke makes the case that the child-obsessed “baby crazies” (a.k.a. the dummy mummies) have  “reverted, 50s-style, to identifying themselves primarily, vociferously, and sometimes exclusively, as mothers.” She argues that a “loony excess of maternal feeling” is the result of women having their babies later in life. “[When they have children. they] feel grateful, a gratefulness that gives them the zeal of the convert. And it is this zeal, I am assuming, that prevents boredom from setting in as they ponder the pros and cons of the Bugaboo Bee.”

TWO.
In Why I don’t want children, Polly Vernon argues that parenthood turns adults -- particularly women -- into self-absorbed, selfish bores (much the same point Cooke makes in her piece, which makes you wonder why The Guardian saw the need to run two we-hate-mothers diatribes on the same day). Anyway, here's Vernon:

“I really don't like what parenthood does to grown-ups....Spare me the one-track conversations. Spare me the self-righteousness, the sense of entitlement (you, with the toddler-on-wheels: astonishing news just in! You don't have pavement priority over the rest of the world!). Spare me the pretensions of martyrdom and selflessness....And please spare me the pitying glances (I promise I don't want what you have. Honestly, I find it mind-boggling that you don't want what I have. Are you quite sure you're not poleaxed with jealousy?). While I always offer pregnant women my seat on the Tube, on my darkest days I also find myself thinking: let's get something straight here. Your condition is self-inflicted, you made the choice to get knocked up, and you presumably knew it'd leave you incapacitated in this way. I don't know if you deserve my seat any more than you would if you were incapacitated by a banging hangover, say, or a great deal of shopping.”

THREE.
And in 20 other reasons not to have a baby, John Hind offers a catch-all list of reasons for abstaining from parenthood, with those reasons ranging from the gynecological (“96% of women say they are "less pleased" with their vaginas a year after giving birth than before”) to the environmental (“British parents wishing to offset the C02 emissions resulting from bringing one child into the world would need to plant 1,073 trees”) to the financial (“The Optimum Population Forum judges the price of a condom to have had a nine million per cent "return on investment" when set against the cost to the planet of having a child.”) Go ahead and check out the other 17 reasons, if you dare.

Here’s a footnote which you may find interesting if, like me, you are interested in the way that the media influences the ideas we form about parenting. The Guardian’s down-with-parenthood triple-header ran just a few days after columnist Kira Cochrane accused the British press of pinning the blame for all of societies ills on moms. (She was referring to a barrage of media coverage in response to an important UK report about childhood: A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age. You can read The Star’s coverage of that same report here at ParentCentral.ca.) Here's what Cochrane had to say:

“A quick scan of the newspapers would have led to the assumption that the report is about one thing alone: how armies of working women are laying waste to family life.

"Working women 'fuel family splits'" said the Daily Telegraph's front page headline.

"Kids 'damaged' by mums who work" blared the Sun.

"Mum's cash 'leading to split home'" frothed the Mirror.

"Children 'suffering from lack of two-parent family'" pronounced the Mail.

“The people who really seem to be implying that women should get back to the kitchen are the newspapers themselves.”

It's not unusual for societies to adopt increasingly conservative attitudes when things go from bad to worse -- and the UK is being particularly hard-hit by the current economic hard times. But declaring it open season on mothers (at least via the newspaper headline or Sunday feature) isn't the way to deal with the need for change.

That's an important point to bear in mind, just in case the next British import happens to be a wave of just-blame-mom mania. We've got enough of our own bizarro attitudes about motherhood to sort through here in North America.

Update:

I just noticed tonight (Thurs. Feb. 12th) that Her Bad Mother -- a popular Toronto-area blogger -- has written a passionate response to Rachel Cooke's piece (mentioned above). The debate is raging in the comments section over Her Bad Mother's blog. Was Cooke serious when she put forth such outrageous arguments? Should women ever question other women's choices? Those are just a few of the issues that are being debated over at Her Bad Mother.

And the Sleep Debates Are Back On

Resist the temptation to hit the snooze button -- or to start a pillow fight. There's too much at stake in the sleep safety wars.

Another infant sleep safety study is making headline news – which means that one of the hottest debates parenting debates is back on again: whether or not you should sleep with your baby.

Here's the dirty little secret about this particular debate. The majority of parents end up sleeping with their baby at some point, whether if it's for a single night or the long haul.

That primal quest for sleep -- to say nothing of that primal drive to comfort a baby who refuses to fall asleep more than an arm's length away from a parent because the baby is lonely, scared, in pain, or simply a baby -- can lead to a rewriting of the sleep rules at any time.

When that happens, parents find themselves in the situation of having to make complex sleep safety decisions when they're at their most sleep deprived and least coherent.

And if they had never intended to bed share (and didn't bother reading up on bed sharing issues as a result), they can find themselves improvising in the area of sleep safety as well.

This is not a good thing.

The lack of any official bed-sharing guidelines doesn't make life any easier for sleep-deprived moms and dads -- or wide-awake moms and dads for that matter, either. They have to make up their minds about a complex situation without having all the facts they need to make a truly informed sleep decision. You see, in an effort to avoid doing any harm, public health authorities have failed to share sleep safety information that has the potential to prevent harm. Talk about a sleep-safety Catch 22.

The Canadian Paediatric Society is one of the few health organizations to recognize this problem and shine a spotlight on what needs to be done. Its sleep guidelines highlight the need to support parents by providing them with information about all sleeping infant environments: "No sleep environment is completely risk-free, but much can be done to educate parents on the provision of safer sleeping environments for their infants," the recommendations state.

The CPS, however, tends to be the exception rather than the rule.

Other health authorities, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, have taken a much more conservative approach to providing information about bed sharing -- and been much criticized as a result. 'While bed sharing can never be publicly recommended, due to its complexity, blanket recommendations against bed sharing and eliminating safety information for bed sharing families cannot be justified either,"  respected sleep anthropologist James McKenna, PhD, has stated (.pdf), for example.

So what's a sleep-deprived and safety-conscious parent to do in the absence of comprehensive evidence-based sleep sharing guidelines?

Get informed, regardless of what you think you'll be doing about bed sharing tonight, tomorrow, or next week. Share the best sources of sleep safety information with other parents. And stay tapped into the sleep research grapevine. 

Resources:

Here are some resources you may find useful, whether you're currently bed sharing, thinking about bed sharing, or positive you won't be bed sharing ever. (Never say never, remember.) Because we're still waiting for an evidence-based set of guidelines to be released by a pediatric health authority (and we may be waiting some time for such guidelines), you'll probably want to consult as many of the following sources as possible before making your own decisions about whether or not to bed share.

• Canadian Paediatric Society: Safe Sleep for Babies
• Canadian Paediatric Society: CPS  Position Statement: Safe Sleeping Environments for Infants and Children
  
• American Academy of Pediatrics: The Changing Concept of Sudden Infant Death (.pdf)
• American Academy of Pediatrics: Other Sleep Resources
• "Sleep Arrangements and Bed-Sharing Families in the Home Setting:" Baddock et al. Pediatrics, January 2, 2007.
• The Natural Child Project: James McKenna, PhD
• PhD in Parenthood: Co-Sleeping Safety 
• A Safer Sleep (.pdf) tip sheet which I developed for a parenting workshop. It is based on a much lengthier chapter on this topic ("Bedroom Politics: Where Will Your Baby Sleep?") from my book Sleep Solutions for Your Baby, Toddler, and Preschooler (Wiley, 2006). (More sleep articles here.)

BE SLEEP SAFETY SAVVY: Steer clear of sleep safety source that promises to offer the definitive set of do's and don'ts for safe bed sharing. No source can make that guarantee at this time; just as no source can make the opposite guarantee -- that your baby can sleep totally risk-free away from you. Nothing about babies and sleep is totally risk-free, just as nothing about raising kids is totally risk-free. "Safer" or "less risky" is the best deal going.

The Stuff of Which Pre-Baby Fantasies Are Made

One of the hottest new trends in the world of pregnancy and babies is the baby planner: a consultant/concierge who, for $75 to $150 per hour, will ensure that baby has all the right stuff (green, silver spoon, or both); the perfect nursery (hip, healthy, and unique); the ideal baby shower (one that generates the right stuff for the perfect nursery and encourages friends and family members to purchase the services of the baby planner to boot).

Baby planners are selling something bigger than the specific services listed on their baby menus, of course. They're selling the stuff of which pre-baby fantasies are made: visions of after-baby bliss. Baby planners promise to ease the transition to parenthood by providing parents-to-be with the knowledge, the tools, and the gear needed to feel confident and in control every step of the way. There's no need to worry. Someone else is at the controls. You can just relax and enjoy the ride.

If only it were possible to download the worry -- and to predict every parenting curve ball ahead of time. Unfortunately, that's not the nature of the adventure you've signed on for. The thing you need to know about parenting is that nothing is perfect or predictable – and hiring a baby planner isn't about to change that reality. If anything, you might end up with a false sense of security about your readiness for baby and a heightened sense of unreality after baby arrives (the result of downloading all the baby preparation functions to someone else). After all, when you're picking out baby clothes or choosing a color of paint for your baby's nursery, there's something fundamentally important going on deep inside your brain. As you handle that sleeper and pour through those paint chips, you get a chance to prepare psychologically for baby's impending arrival. Outsource too many of those nesting-type functions to a baby planner and you may find the jump from the abstract concept of being pregnant to the physical reality of having a baby in your arms sudden and jarring. Besides, the musing and the dreaming and the thinking and the planning are the stuff of which pregnancy and baby memories are made. You don't want to miss out on the magic. Really.

Here's something else to think about as you mull over the pros and cons of hiring a baby planner. Nice-to-haves can rapidly morph into must-haves and frills can disguise themselves as necessities once you appoint a designated shopper. After all, she has to justify her reason for being. Case in point: "Making sure that all your notes and announcements are unique to you and your family is a top priority," says Time to Nest, a Maryland-based baby planning company. And another: " She deserves the very best, so give her what she wants, diamonds, birthstones, and platinum, oh my!" adds Ohio-based Blue Skye Baby.

Likewise, experiences like the baby shower that were once the exclusive domain of family and friends become part of the post-modern baby marketing machine: "Showers are a wonderful time for the expecting family to be surrounded by loving friends and family. Time to Nest can offer gift ideas and services that are sure to mean so much. Providing the soon-to-be-parents with our Make Your Mark service is also a wonderful gesture that can be included in the party planning."

If your budget can swing upwards of $75/hour for a shot at the fleeting fantasy of post-baby perfection --- a fantasy that will hold up for as long as it takes you to realize that a professionally accessorized nursery doesn't necessarily guarantee postpartum bliss – and what's being offered seems like good value to you, then go for it. Just realize that there are other less pricey and more time-honored ways of achieving the same goal (sans the coordinating accessories). The not-so-secret recipe is to tap into the parenting community in your area, to do your own research about the hot-button parenting issues of the day, and to trust your own instincts as a parent (something that becomes easier as you clock more time as a new mom or dad). And spend the money you would have paid the baby planner on things your baby really needs and invest in a dream with staying power: start trying to make things better for all the babies of the world.

Postscript: Thinking of Hiring a Baby Planner? Be Baby Planner Wise:

• If a baby planner refers to a select list of service providers, find out whether these individuals are screened by the baby planner (e.g., reference and police checks) and whether any referral or kick-back fees move back and forth between the baby planner and the service provider.
• If you're interested in taking a parenting course offered by a baby planner (typical topics include infant and child safety, baby proofing, the do's and don'ts of installing a car seat, making your own baby food) ask about the instructor's credentials and compare the cost of the course with similar offerings in your community. You might be able to find a similar course being offered free of charge (or on a cost-recovery basis) through community or non-profit organizations.