Category: Parenting

Charting the puzzles and peeves of kid-herding — from Huggies to homework, Pilates to pinatas.

Happy Meals lose weight

Published on November 11, 2010

San Francisco supes, where ya been all my life?

In a landslide vote last week, Fog City’s board of Supervisors made it illegal for fast-food eateries to include toys in kiddie meals that fall below reasonable nutrition standards. No more can the area’s burger mills market high-calorie, high-fat, high-sodium food to children with the promise of a plastic, princess-shaped choking hazard in every grease-stained sack.

It was a bold move, to be sure — a move undertaken to deflate ballooning childhood obesity rates, and a move that left the Happy Meal^TM-hawking McDonald’s corporation understandably unHappy^TM.

But I, for one, applaud it.

Oh, I know your new law will be ridiculed. I know loud-howling liberty-lovers will call your “eat this, not that” edict an audacious obstruction of free enterprise and a bass-ackward Band-Aid of a solution to a staggeringly complex socio-economic problem. Also, let’s face it, the crap food is still being served at irresistibly low prices, and this is exactly the sort of chop-off-our-hands-to-keep-us-from-harming-ourselves legislation that makes us liberals seem so frighteningly stupid.

Scouting for Some Sense

Published on October 28, 2010

Pet Care. Kickball. Archery. Cub Scouts earn a colored belt loop for each cool new skill they master. Strangely, the organization doesn’t make a loop for the lesson that’s being taught to the little boys in Pack 70 of University Park, Texas: intolerance.

The pack’s leaders stripped a fellow dad of his uniform and troop leadership role earlier this month because he’s gay.

That’s all. Just gay.

For two years, Jon Langbert and his nine-year-old son, Carter, were active in the pack; Carter has more than 15 loops on his belt for fishing, woodworking, basketball, and chess.

Langbert was once a Cub Scout himself and treasures memories of building pinewood derby cars with his own dad. But he worried about joining with Carter.

“I was concerned about the gay issue,” he told me last week. “I called the Cubmaster and said, ‘Hey, I’m a gay guy and my son wants to sign up. Is there going to be any problem with that?'” The Cubmaster welcomed him, and the pack even nominated him to run its popcorn-sales fundraiser. A Harvard Business School grad, Langbert brought sales up from \$4,000 to \$13,000 in one year.

Insanity by Baby Book

Published on September 30, 2010

Shhh. Listen … There! Did you hear that? That snarky mumbling? They’re doing it again. Taunting me. Shaming me. Making judgmental “tsk, tsk” sounds in my direction.

Yes, I know they’re only books. Just glossy hardcover journals. Just pretty pastel diaries with a soft-focus cover photo of some baby’s delicious feet. The books look so tidy and innocuous, with their sweet ribbon embellishments.

But we know better, don’t we?

We moms know that baby books — those keepsake compendiums where we’re supposed to inventory our kids’ cute sayings and developmental milestones for posterity — do not exist to bring joy to families. They exist to bring revenue to the gift industry. And to drive me self-loathingly, inferiority-complexedly deranged. (Ooh, there’s a nice line for the baby book. Lemme jot that one down.)

Sure, there was a time — when my babies napped often and I was too exhausted to stand up and go make a sandwich — when I wrote diligently, dutifully in those pretty books: “Why we chose your name … ,” “Our first days together … ,” “Your first smile … .”

Take My Kids … Please

Published on September 16, 2010

It was like a meeting of Irresponsible Parents Anonymous. Shuffling anxiously into the sterile office, we were strangers to one another, with two shared attributes: shame that we hadn’t taken care of this sooner, and relief that we were finally doing something about it.

We are the laggard parents (perhaps you’re one of us?) who haven’t yet named a legal guardian for our children — haven’t debated the relative merits of various friends and family members to raise our children in the event of our untimely deaths, haven’t had the touchy conversation with said individuals wherein we ask them to accept the onerous responsibility of ushering our spawn gracefully into adulthood, haven’t filled out the legal paperwork making the decision official … But as you see, the process is complex.

It’s one of those parenting chores that fall into the category of “prudence” — and that I stink at. Saving for their college. Having them fingerprinted. Even getting them flu shots. So if I’m an unfit mother for not planning for their potential orphanhood, well, add it to the list.

Life is Laundry

Published on September 2, 2010

Some of my friends are sending their kids off to college this fall and discovering, with some shame, that their offspring — who can build Web sites, play stringed instruments, and locate Latvia on a world map — are deficient in other life skills. Basic skills. Crucial skills.
“We just got back from dropping Devon off for his first night in the dorm,” says my friend Tracy. A superlative mother, Tracy has taught her children to play cribbage, iron a dress shirt, and consider protein and fiber percentages when choosing their breakfast cereals. But that evening, while introducing her son to his new bedroom, she realized there are still some things she’s failed to demonstrate.
“They need to learn how to put sheets on their bed,” she says, describing a slapstick scene of mattress-wrestling that left her shaking her head. “Thank god he didn’t have the top bunk.”
We modern parents are great at teaching our kids the value of empathy, recycling, and broad bandwidth. But have we forgotten to school them in, say, soaping their skivvies?
A young woman I know admits she had no idea how to do laundry when she left home: “My mother always said she paid too much for my clothes to let me mess them up in the wash.”
Another says she’s flummoxed by grocery shopping: “I always forget to buy something important.”

Our Kids are Snitches

Published on August 19, 2010

Running for office requires a hardy hide. Detractors lob accusations as easily as jugglers hurling torches; politicians expect it. But Oklahoma judicial candidate John Mantooth is being pelted by a particularly painful source: his own grown daughter.

Jan Schill (formerly Mantooth) recently took out a newspaper ad that read, “Do Not Vote for My Dad!” on the grounds that he’s “NOT a good father, NOT a good grandfather,” and would make a lousy judge. She launched DoNotVoteForMyDad.com, linking to legal documents that call his integrity into question and describing a Christmas gift she once received from her pop — a box of chocolates infested with worms and weevils.

Eww. I don’t care if you vote for him, but do not under any circumstances invite this guy to a secret Santa swap.

The candidate claims his daughter is embittered by his ugly decades-gone-by divorce from her mother, which may be true. But it’s hard to ignore the shocking shriek of a child blowing the whistle on her own badly behaving begetter.

Cops heeded just such a shriek last week when a 13-year-old New York girl called 911 from the backseat of her mother’s swerving car to report that mom was driving drunk. The good news: Troopers hauled in the besotted mama before anyone was hurt. The bad: Dinnertime conversation at their house will be awkward for quite some time.

Family Travels

Published on August 5, 2010

You’ve got a lot of nerve calling this a vacation. I’m chasing sun-punchy children around a murky pool with a spray-can of SPF, wondering how the oldest will survive on his all-Doritos-and-no-sleep diet and why the youngest appears to be missing a shoe. Just one shoe, not both.

I took off work for this. I got a dog-sitter. I’m spending $20 a night just to park my car — the same car that’s strewn with minuscule pegs from the inexplicably explosive Travel Battleship game.

This is not hell. I understand: It’s family travel. It’s togetherness-away-from-home. It’s bonding-over-adventures and, more often, under adventures.

But it ain’t my idea of a vacation.

Where’s the cabana boy I was promised? Where’s the bottomless blended cocktail and crisply pressed sheets? Where’s the blessed silence? The divine stillness? The hallowed, hard-won sloth, for flip-flop’s sake?

Vacations used to be different for my husband and me: isolation, rejuvenation, coconut libations. Our idea of bliss is sitting somewhere sunny, doing less than nothing, and consuming our weight (pre-vacation weight, to be clear) in guacamole.

Why Have Kids? No, Really.

Published on July 8, 2010

I’m sitting with some great old friends from high school, catching up on the last 20 years of our lives. There was a time when we had everything in common, from favorite teachers to lunchtime hangouts to homework due dates. And it’s fun — even comforting — to see how much we’re still alike politically, professionally, socially …

But then talk turns to the way we’re most different: My kids and their cats.

Often there’s judgment implicit when breeders and nonbreeders get to squawking about offspring. But not us. My pals seem genuinely charmed when I brag about my smarter-than-average spawn (whether they find my kids inspiring or my preening adorable, I can’t be sure). And I don’t question it when they tell me their cats are awesome, their life is good, and that they aren’t convinced procreating would improve it. I believe them.

Except … there’s something about the way they say that — is there a flicker of doubt on their faces? a subtle rise in intonation? — that makes it seem more like a question than a statement. It feels like they’re asking me outright: Starshine, why have kids?

I Ain't No Supermodel

Published on June 24, 2010

Every summer the kids go spend a week at Grandpa’s. It’s good for them: They learn to fish and appreciate Abbott and Costello. It’s good for Grandpa, too: He gets someone to share his mud pie and mow his lawn.

But mostly, it’s good for my husband and me. We take full advantage of our offspring’s absence by vowing to pursue distinctly adult pleasures, avoiding Go-GURT and playground sand at all costs.

We go out at night and stay out later than we need to — later than we even want to — just to wallow in the freaky freedom of not having to check in with a sitter. Or we stay home, eat Brie for dinner, and watch R-rated movies at full volume, ecstatic in the certainty that no one will stumble in saying, “Mommy, that prison rape scene woke me up… ” We plan marathon sessions of wild monkey sex but never get around to them because, frankly, our mojo has so long been attuned to the family schedule that without the threat of being walked in on, the deed loses some urgency.

But it’s okay. Because by about the third day, we realize — with appropriate shame — that what we want most is not to savor the privileges of adulthood; it’s to behave like infants.

Forced Friends

Published on June 10, 2010

If you ever need a friend, introduce yourself to a kid. Unguarded, transparent, and loyal, kids collect pals like pennies.

You never see toddlers nix a friendship over political ideology, or renounce a terrific rapport just because their buddy has a nicer lunchbox and it makes them feel bad about themselves. Their only requirements for friendship: proximity and a grin. And a pile of goldfish crackers doesn’t hurt.

This is a remarkable character trait. Beautiful, really. Until the unchoosy little chums force it on their picky, prickly parents, and then it’s annoying as hell.

Have you ever been thrust unwillingly into crony-hood with other parents simply because your kids are friends? Forced to play nice with a mom you can’t stand — to meet for play dates, chat in schoolyards, attend awkward barbecues — because your children can’t bear to be apart?

It’s irksome. Adults are far more fastidious about investing in friendships. We’re lazier, less patient, more close-minded, but …

“It’s hard to give up valuable time to people who drive you nuts,” explains a mom I know who’s experiencing this now. “I have nothing in common with this woman other than our daughters being friends, and she is so irritating, it’s hard to tolerate more than five minutes of her.”