Caving on Cell Phones

Oh, the stupid things that my friends and I used to say before having kids. Things like . . .

“Even though you traveled more than 1,000 miles to come to my wedding, you must leave your baby with a sitter you’ve never met before.”

and . . .

“We’re going to go out every Saturday night just like we do now.”

You’d think we’d learn. But no, ridiculous statements keep flying out of our mouths prior to every age our children reach. We judge others before we ever walk in their shoes. Hence, my “better-than-though” belief of “can you believe they got their 10 year old a cell phone?”

Of course, as my daughter has now reached that age and will go off to middle school next year where my husband can no longer easily check on her (he teaches at her elementary school), I’m rapidly reconsidering the error of my ways.

And maybe I will have research on my side. A new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Networked Families, found “cell phones allow family members to stay more regularly in touch even when they are not physically together.”

The authors write: “Parents and spouses are using the internet and cell phones to create a ‘new connectedness’ that builds on remote connections and shared internet experiences.”

It’s definitely true for my mother and me. In the craziness of the day—getting kids to school, working all day, dinner, post dinner time with kids, exercise, etc.—getting in phone calls is difficult. But, with my cell phone I can easily talk to my mom while commuting to work. We definitely talk more frequently because of it.

Alas, maybe it’s not all good news for younger kids though. In reacting to the research, Amy Hatch posted the following over at the Celebrity Baby blog. “My kids aren’t old enough to have cell phones, but when they are, I don’t know how often I would check in. My folks didn’t keep tabs on me 24/7, and it fostered a sense of independence. The last thing I want to do is become a helicopter parent. I’m all for connectedness, but how much is too much?”

This is a good point. But I must admit that I’d take comfort in knowing that I could get in touch with my daughter if I needed to—it doesn’t mean that I have to.

Apparently a lot of people feel this way. In my search for more information, I found the work of James E. Katz. He’s a professor of communication at Rutgers’ School of Communication, Information and Library Studies, and he’s done a lot of research in this area. He notes:

Parents think they can reach kids any time they want, and thus are more indulgent of their children’s wanderings. Children exploit this longer leash, traveling farther afield and taking bigger risks. Not only are parents relinquishing direct supervision of their children, tech-savvy kids are finding all kinds of ways to use wireless technology as a kind of parent filter. The standard excuse of choice among the sneaking-home-after-midnight set, “My car ran out of gas,” is being replaced by, “My cell phone battery went dead.

Uh oh—back to square one! What do you make of all of this?

Maybe they really do listen

If I were president . . . this was the prompt for my 5^th grader’s morning writing assignment in school.

If I were president . . .

I would let kids after taking a test to prove they knew the candidates and what they stood for to be allowed to vote. I would do this because the president and the things he does affects our lives too.

I would also make the school lunch menus more healthy with things like salad options and meat that isn’t hamburger and hot dogs. I would do this because being healthy is very important.

I would do whatever I could to stop the multiple genocides in Africa. Haven’t they suffered enough? If it was happening here wouldn’t we want someone to help us? So why shouldn’t they? To help I would try convince China to stop helping Sudan.

If I were president I would make it my lifetime struggle to make the world a better place.

This brought tears to my eyes. Aside from the beauty of what she writes; She actually processes what I say.

This is a child who turns her nose up at all vegetables; begs for chips and hot dogs and candy; and fights every step of the way about eating healthy. Yet, she obviously hears my reasoning and thinks it valid.

I’ve taken her to several marches, including one in DC related to Darfur. I want her to learn that she needs to speak up when she sees something wrong. Perhaps these experiences have made an impact.

My anecdotal experiences seem to bear out in research. For example, one study says “adolescents who perceive that both parents would respond negatively and be upset by their smoking are less likely to smoke.” Another study says “Encouraging parents . . to discuss smoking-related issues with their children in a constructive and respectful manner is worth exploring as an intervention strategy to prevent young people taking up smoking.

And goodness know there have been tons of PSAs on the topic of talking to kids about a range of high-risk behaviors.

And there are some classics dealing with drug abuse.

So I will think of her writing the next time she rolls her eyes at me, stomps up the stairs, or gives me the “mom!” in that tone that all mothers of daughter have heard. Somewhere in there, she must actually be listening.

Mommy . . . can I get in bed with you?

Mommy . . . can I get in bed with you? Can we cuddle?

I love and hate these words. My 6 year-old probably comes in a once or twice a week in the wee, wee hours of the morning, walking all the way around the bed to my side, tapping gently next to me and whispering this age-old question.

I love that he still wants to cuddle—and he is so snuggly. However, I also thought I left interrupted sleep with diapers, temper tantrums, and bottles–in the past! Obviously not. A few days ago over-tiredness finally won out. I told him he needed to try and go back to sleep first, but if he really needed a parent, to wake up dad.

Bad decision. He woke up dad, which woke me up anyway. (I’m a light sleeper.) The result: Mom still awake and now doesn’t even get the benefit of snuggles.

I know many will say he really needs to just stay in bed and work through it. But I also know snuggly time isn’t going to last that much longer with a 6 year old boy. So, we’re going back to the old way.

Kathleen Rundle posted an interesting blog on a related subject. She wrote:

They may not talk about it often but most American families actually have family beds to some degree. Some families do insist that children sleep in their own beds every night, no matter what. Most parents at least allow their children to join them when they have nightmares. Many allow them to whenever they like. Some parents even encourage their children to join them at night.

There’s also a lot of interesting research on snuggles. One recent study found that a mother’s cuddle is a natural painkiller for babies.

What do you do in your house?

Is “Unschooling” About the Parent or the Child?

I never felt part of the mommy wars. If anything, I was jealous of my stay-home mom friends. But alas, I married a teacher—need I say more?

So my children began child care early and, today they are both in elementary school. (They do get a bonus that most kids don’t—they get daddy 24/7 all summer long.)

I firmly believe that there are benefits and negatives to both full-time child care and staying at home full-time. That said, most of us make our decisions based on what is best for our child given the circumstances in which we live.

Which leads me to what I want to talk about. I stumbled on a blog by Joanne Rendell about “unschooling.” The unschooling.com website explains it like this:

Have you ever described ‘red’ to a person who is color blind? Sometimes, trying to define unschooling is like trying to define red. Ask 30 unschoolers to define the word and you’ll get thirty shades of red. They’ll all be red, but they’ll all be different. Generally, unschoolers are concerned with learning or becoming educated, not with ‘doing school.’ The focus is upon the choices made by each individual learner, and those choices can vary according to learning style and personality type. There is no one way to unschool.

Although they do offer multiple definitions.

Frankly, what I really struggled with was Rendell’s closing. She writes:

But un-kindergarten for us means Benny can sleep late so I can write. It means we don’t have to worry about bedtimes and can go out on the town with friends any night of the week. We can go to Europe and visit my family when the flights are cheap. Un-kindergarten also means we can pick and choose how we spend our days and who we spend them with. Benny can go to free classes at the Metropolitan Museum in the week when it’s less crowded. He can read a book on sharks when he feels like it. He can experiment with bungee cords while eating his breakfast at noon.

The decision seems to be about what’s most convenient for the parents, rather than what may be best for the child. John J. Edwards III addresses the issue in his blog on the Wall Street Journal. He says, “Maybe I’m hopelessly square, but I think early-childhood education—like education in general—provides structure and discipline while not necessarily stifling creativity.”

What do you think?

Who’s to Blame When Kids Make Mistakes?

All of the news coverage of Sarah Palin’s daughter’s teen pregnancy is making me cringe.

First, in the interest of full disclosure—I am mostly (though not always) a liberal Democrat. But I’m looking this through a very different lens right now. A parental lens.

Does the fact that her teen daughter had sex, something went wrong, and she got pregnant say anything about Governor’s Palin’s parenting skills or the type of person she is or the leader she would be? Honestly, I don’t know. But I hope not.

Yet, I’ve heard Republican and Democrat women suggest that it does. On NPR’s Day to Day , a woman identifying herself as a 20 year-old Republican criticized Governor Palin’s ability to properly parent her daughter.

While little in life is guaranteed, I feel pretty confident in saying that my children will make mistakes. Will it be fair to judge me by those mistakes? Can my character be questioned as a result of my children’s mistakes? I know I made plenty as a teen—most of which, thankfully, my parents are still unaware of. It’s part of growing up.

It seems to me there are enough critical issues facing the country right now that speculating over who may or not be to blame for a teen’s actions is a grave disservice to all of us.

One of Life’s Mysteries

Can someone please explain this to me?

 

All summer long, my 6-year-old hopped out of bed in the wee hours of the morning ready to start to his day.

 

Now school has started. The alarm is set for 7 AM. He sleeps until it goes off (and sometimes through it), groggily climbs out of bed, and complains about having to get up so early. Huh?!?!? The weekend comes, and bam, back up with the sun.

 

Does anyone else have this experience?

 

If you have older kids, I just heard about this cool new wake-up service—they can get celebrity wake-up calls. Here’s what was written up in PEN’s Weekly News Blast (an excellent eNewsletter on education issues, BTW):

 

To help teenagers get up in the morning and get themselves to school, the Ad Council and the Army have teamed up with Cellit, a Chicago-based mobile marketing company, to enable parents and peers to send the kids free wakeup messages recorded by professional athletes and celebrities, reports Business Wire in the Wall Street Journal. A website, www.boostup.org, allows visitors to preview and select the messages, which can then be sent to specified cell-phone numbers at a given time. The basketball star Amare Stoudemire helped start the program. In one message, he says, “Good morning. This is Amare Stoudemire from the Phoenix Suns. Just calling to remind you it’s time to get out of bed and go to school. Don’t make me call you twice!”

Read more.

Home Alone: When can I stop paying the babysitter?!

Perhaps Home Alone isn’t really a good movie for kids to see. After watching it during a very long drive from North Carolina to Maine, the kids commented how cool it would be to sled down the stairs and out the door as Macaulay Caulkin does. Fortunately it hardly evers snow in NC, so we don’t own a sled. But my husband, in his infinite wisdom, shared how as a kid he and his brother somehow connected Hot Wheel tracks and skied down the stairway. These very same tracks sit in our bonus room . . .  readily accessible for such an adventure.

 

All this is to say, will I ever be able to leave the kids in the house alone because I’ve been dreaming of the day when my daughter can babysit my son, and I can actually afford to go out instead of going into debt paying the sitter.

 

Lisa W. Foderaro wrote about this topic  in yesterday’s New York Times–Children Left Alone at Home, Worriedly.

 

Her article has set off a frenzy of blog commentary. Alice Bradley decided to consult her mom about the issue. She insisted that she didn’t leave Alice alone until she was 11, and that Alice was an incredibly mature young child. Alice’s response:  “I was a big baby. If the oven had suddenly caught fire I would have hid under my bed. I suspect my mom crossed her fingers and hoped for the best.”

 

Meredith O’Brien talks about a friend who has decided to let her grade school-aged boys stay home alone after school for the 20-minute or so gap in between the time the bus drops them off and the time she gets home from work.

 

In the NYT piece, Sharman Stein, a spokeswoman for the New York City Administration for Children’s Services, says “There are child-safety experts who believe some 10-year-olds are quite O.K. alone and others who would tell you that there are some 14-year-olds they wouldn’t leave alone.”

 

This seems to be the general consensus of most “experts.” It’s not about an age, it’s about a personality. In its fact sheet on the subject, the The American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry says, “ Parent (s) must consider the child’s level of maturity and past evidence of responsible behavior and good judgment.”

 

As the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services notes, “No consistent community standards exist describing when and under what circumstances children can be left alone or in the care of other children.”

 

Standards or not, many kids are staying home alone. A 2003 study by Child Trends, estimated that three million children nationwide under the age of 13 are home alone for at least a few hours a week on a regular basis.

 

But even when parents do leave their kids home alone, they worry. A poll by The University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, found that “many parents leave their tweens home alone for an extended period of time, even though they are not confident these 11- to 13-year-olds have the knowledge or skills to stay safe.”

 

I have left my daughter at home alone twice—and for no more than 30 minutes. I’m not sure how I feel about leaving her alone longer. And there is no way that she is ready to watch her brother (or maybe it’s the other way around).

 

The Today’s Parent website has some good tips for parents, including a great check list.

 

 

Sex is Not a Four Letter Word (Talking to Kids About Sex)

Sex. It’s everywhere—including the bible. So what happens when children, in this case 4^th graders, begin discussing bible stories in religious school that deal with sexually-charged topics? From the very beginning, the story of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar deals with reproductive issues.

 

In our community, this has created significant discomfort with some parents. A friend told me that since her daughter was born she had a plan that when her daughter turned 12, she would explain topics like menstruation and sex.

 

We’ve taken a different attitude in our house. I’ve always answered my kids questions—of course that doesn’t mean giving them adult answers, but doing so in age appropriate ways. This means starting with the most simplistic answer first and seeing where the child goes. Someone was told me a story about a child who had been watching television with her dad. When the commercial came, she turned to her dad and asked, “What’s a climax?” He turned red and got very flustered. Fortunately, he gathered his wits enough to ask where she had heard the word. Her answer, “The television just said ‘stay tuned for the climax.’”

 

My daughter knew the basics of menstruation from when she was a toddler. Why? Because sometimes I had to go to the bathroom when we were out, and in Washington, DC I was definitely bringing her in the stall with me. She saw things first hand, and it was either let her be terrified that mom was hurt or give a simplistic, yet accurate, explanation.

 

As for sex, when my daughter was in second grade, she wanted to know what those penguins were doing in March of the Penguins, and I answered her questions, while all of the time inserting our moral values into the conversation. I also told her two important things.

1. This was not a topic for her to discuss with her friends. It is up to her friends’ parents to convey this information.
2. If she did hear things from her friends, she should talk to me because kids often don’t have the facts straight.

My son hasn’t asked any questions yet. So for him, we just make sure he knows the proper names for all of his body parts. Including his scrotum—a word that caused a Newberry winning book to be banned by some school librarians. “The Higher Power of Lucky” includes the word “scrotum” to describe where a dog gets a snake bite.   At the time, NPR talked to boys in a Tuscon library and most had no idea what a scrotum was–much less that it was a body part that they had!

 

Many kids are taught all of the proper names for part of their body except for their genitals. In her book, “From Diapers to Dating: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Sexually Healthy Children From Infancy to Middle School,” Debra Haffner notes, “When you use euphemisms only for the genitals, you are giving your child a message that these parts of the body are uncomfortable or different.  You may, without meaning to or realizing it, even introduce a sense of shame or guilt about this part of the body.”

 

Haffner’s book is the one parenting book I actually did read and highly recommend to any parent. I suppose I had my own parental induced hang-ups and wanted my children to avoid that. And, I really wanted to create an environment where they would get their information from me and felt comfortable coming to me with questions.

 

And when it comes to talk to my son about sex, I’ll be doing that too. Consider the findings from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health.

• Teens who reported more satisfaction in their relationship with their mother were less likely to report having sex in the subsequent year, more likely to use birth control the last time they had sex and less likely to get pregnant.
• The more disapproving adolescents perceived their mother to be toward their engaging in sexual intercourse, the less likely they were to have sexual intercourse.
• Teens perceptions of their mothers’ attitudes toward abstinence are more predictive of sexual outcomes (e.g., intercourse, use of birth control, pregnancy) than actual maternal attitudes.

 

 

 

 

Kid-sickness—Guilty!

Yesterday’s paper had an article on what AP writer Martha Irvine called a new disease, “kid-sickness.”

It used to be the homesick kid begging to come home from camp. Now [camp directors] have noticed that it’s often parents who have more trouble letting go.

They call it “kid-sickness,” a condition attributed in large part to today’s more involved style of parenting. Observers also say it’s being exacerbated by our ability to be in constant contact by cell phone and computer, as well as many parents’ perception that the world is a more dangerous place.

I don’t think of myself as a hovering parent. (Is there some sort of quiz I can take to determine this?) Yet, when it comes to “kid-sickness,” I plead guilty. And as Irvine noted, the need for contact played a significant role.

After my daughter begged to go to sleep away camp, I finally convinced my husband that it was a good idea. I had gone as kid for several summers and loved it. She had been away for 10 days before on a trip with her grandparents, so I figured I could handle a 2-week camp. Wrong! The major difference. No cell phone. No contact. Only snail mail.

I didn’t worry about her being hurt; I knew I’d hear about that right away. But was she happy? Had she made friends? Was she lonely? When her first postcard finally arrived, it was brief, but to the point. She loved camp. And she closed with these four words, “I am perfectly okay.” Clearly, my daughter knows me well.

When we picked her up, she cried to stay. No homesickness, just the joy of being a kid at camp. She even seemed more confident and outgoing as well. So, while 2-weeks seemed like forever to me (and even longer to her brother), we’ve agreed to let her go back next summer for four.

In the article, Irvine quotes Bob Ditter, a therapist has acted as a consultant to camps since the early 1980s.

“Parents love their kids a lot,” Ditter says. But they also need to let go sometimes. He is, for instance, absolutely opposed to the idea of Internet webcams that allow parents to monitor their children at camp.

 

I agree. Part of going away to camp, is going away.  It’s often a child’s first real taste of independence from parents. And that’s a good thing. As my mother-in-law reminds me, one of the major jobs of parenting is teaching your kids to become independent.

 

For Jewish families there may be another benefit. In article in the Baltimore Jewish Times, Doug Mankoff, executive board member of the Foundation for Jewish Camps said, “We know kids who go to Jewish summer camp are more likely to grow up with positive feelings about being Jewish.” And even more importantly, camp produces Jewish leaders.

 

Jerry Silverman, president of the Foundation for Jewish Camp, told the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES that as of 2006, 65 percent of Jewish leaders attended a Jewish sleep-away camp.

 

I imagine the same is true of camps for other religions. Does anyone have stats for those?

 

To Quit or Not to Quit

Piano lessons. Parents want their children to have them. Children find practicing the bane of their existence. Is the battle worth it?

For our oldest, we decided it definitely was not. She got no enjoyment out of playing . . . ever. We were exposing her to a variety of things, and we wrote this one off as one that did not interest her. And frankly, (sorry JB if you are reading this) of her many, many talents, music is not one of them. I say that with some hesitance. I don’t want to teach her that if she isn’t good at something she should just quit. However, in other things that she’s tried out of her own genuine interest (like ice skating), we did not let her give up just because it got harder.

Then there’s my son. He has responded to music since the day he came home from the hospital. It instantly soothed him. From the time he could talk, he has spontaneously broken into song at any given moment. And he performs an entire self-composed operetta whenever he plays with his Playmobil castle, dragon and knights.

While ultimately he wants to learn how to play the guitar (at 6 he is a Guitar Hero junkie—and yes, video games are a whole other subject), he’s been told he must learn piano first. He tried a lesson, loved it, and impressed the teacher.

Yet, I know the day is not far off that he too will battle us over practicing. I am committed to not letting him quit. Clearly music brings him joy—and sometimes we all have to work at having a little joy.

A few weeks ago, I posted a blog about singing and learning. FPG now has a whole page devoted to music resources.