Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Book: Over-parenting=Wimpy Kids

Over-parenting. Over-scheduling. Over-bearing. Over-praising. Hmmm, what other hyphenated “over” words could I use to describe the general theme of the new book, A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting by Hara Estroff Marano?

Why don’t I let Wall Street Journal reviewer Tony Woodlief explain the book’s message of urging parents to back off and just let their kids be:

” Ms. Marano’s complaint is that over-involved parents are sapping the will of America’s youth, keeping them from learning how to make decisions and solve problems for themselves . . .

“[Ms. Marano says] we’re focusing on the wrong risks. Let children learn from failure. Let them experience all the childhood freedoms and disappointments that are common in the lives of our nation’s heroes. The college-admissions consultants can wait.”

Sounds like a good read, likely to provide me with more anti-helicopter parent ammo.

Item #2: Going to See ‘Sex’ This Weekend?

 Millions of American women are going to take pleasure in Sex and the City this weekend, including yours truly. And, although the main stars of the uber-hyped film are crazily over-priced fashion, sex, Carrie, Carrie’s friends, sex and fashion, squeezed in between the Jimmy Choos and inevitable Mr. Big disappointments are dramatizations of urban parenting. The new flick promises to depict lawyer Miranda’s life with hubby and child in Brooklyn, as well as Charlotte’s raising of her adopted grade-school-aged daughter and unexpected pregnancy (in the now-canceled TV series, she suffered from infertility).

Hopefully, SATC will be at least a fraction as good as its trailer. Or at least serve as satisfying mind candy.

Item #3: Ankle Woes

The Girl is only 9 years old. Yet, ever since she turned her ankle during a basketball practice this winter, she’s been plagued with ankle aches.

After having had a clean ankle X-ray and giving her injury time to heal, she returned to her normal activities. But ever since the spring soccer season began, The Girl has been complaining, on and off, of ankle pain. Sometimes she has swelling around the area, but not always. She comes home from practice – sometimes in tears – and proceeds to elevate and ice her ankle then wraps it in a bandage.

Another girl from her soccer team is wearing a cast on one of her feet to immobilize her ankle to see if her repeated ankle difficulties will end if she gives her ankle a rest from the tough, cutting movements of soccer. Both girls are in third grade. Aren’t they too young for this kind of thing?

Item #4: Falling Teen Stars

My June Parents & Kids Magazine column revisits the whole Miley Cyrus-Vanity Fair imbroglio and puts it into context with other female, teen idols who have “fallen” and asks the question, “Why?” Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer.

Ready for some politically incorrect satire of motherhood? Get a load of Lifetime TV’s “Mommy Madness” videos starring the quirky Angela Hoover.

Case in point, the video below about trying to work from home when you have small people scampering about. It reminded me of the time when I conducted a telephone interview with a district attorney and my then-toddler decided he no longer wanted to watch the video I’d turned on, went looking for me and started pounding on my bedroom door. I had to literally stick my head underneath my bed so I could hear the district attorney. Then, when the toddler continued laughing and persisted in kicking the door, I figured the DA likely heard the antics and I came clean with him, informing him that I was working from home. At least he was sympathetic. Or did a good job of pretending he was.

Chaperoned.

A third grade field trip.

And survived.

Was responsible for a group of four girls, including my daughter.

We decided to name our group “The HPs” (for “The Harry Potters,” The Girl is obsessed with all things Potter). When we went from one exhibit in the Boston Museum of Science to another, we formed the Hogwarts Express, and wound our way through the halls.

Then our group — along with the other third grade classes — took Duck Tours around the city of Boston, where an open, bus-like vehicle takes passengers to see landmarks by land and via the Charles River. Our tour guide wore pajama bottoms. And bright red sneakers. And was quite charismatic.

When we finally arrived back at the school, I was relieved that no one had gotten lost, injured or was panicked by the jarring electricity/lightning show.

Unfortunately, The Eldest Son, who also went on the same trip, was upset because his father didn’t get picked as a chaperone from among the parents’ who’d applied for the job. (I’ve only chaperoned once — for a trip to a farm with the Youngest Boy’s kindergarten class last year — and The Spouse hasn’t gone on a trip yet, though we’d hoped we’d both be able to do it this time.) The Spouse promised that he’d make it up to him. Maybe when they walk in historic steps along the Freedom Trail on a future trip.

While my chaperoning experiences were spared any melodramatic theatrics, have you ever had anything interesting happen when you’ve accompanied your kids on field trips?

A large article — accompanied by, count ‘em, three color photos — in the New York Times makes the argument that walking around with dramatically, noticeably chipped nail polish is now in. But only if you’re under 35 years old. And only if you’re wearing over-priced designer clothing and toting stupidly expensive purses which hold your now much-lighter wallet.

What reasons does one of the nation’s largest newspapers give for making this declaration?

“Over the last few years . . . having streaked, chipped or just plain grotty nail polish no longer suggests drug addiction, manual labor or pure laziness,” wrote Melena Ryzik. “Like untied high-tops, thread-worn jeans and bedhead, it’s now part of a deliberate look . . . It has been spotted uptown, in professional settings and gala parties, behind department store sales counters and even (gasp!) on beauty and fashion industry insiders.”

If letting your deep red nail polish chip to the point that it looks like you were splattered by blood is now chic — except for oldsters such as myself (the late 30+ crowd) — I’m throwing down the gauntlet. If the Times thinks it can declare something like this a bonafide fashion trend, then I, your intrepid blogger, have decided to jump into the deep end of the pool and declare some fashion trends of my own. . . starting with pony tails, sleekly done, 24/7. Not that pulling all your hair back into a pony tail says that you don’t care, it just tells the world that you have better things to do than spend 77 minutes on your hair every morning.

PJs at the school drop-off or school bus stop. Barely camouflaging your pajamas with a sweater or jacket and casually slipped-on sandals when seeing your children off to school indicates to the world that you were in bed too long.  What better way to get your neighbors to start wondering about whatever could have kept you in bed so late . . . other than garden variety sleep deprivation induced by living with small children.

Root beer or chocolate chip cookie dough lip balm as moisturizer. Who among us hasn’t used our children’s fun, flavorful lip balm on a dry patch or two? Why not make it a full-fledged trend and start regularly smoothing it on our elbows, knees and other parched areas so not only will they be soft and supple, but they’ll smell good too?

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Three for Thursdays (or Four for Fridays if I don’t post on Thursday) will be a regular feature here on the Picket Fence Post. This feature will include newsy/fun/intriguing items that I stumbled upon in the past week. If you happen to see something — an interesting news story, a funny video, an outrage, etc. — that you think would be perfect for Three for Thursdays, please be sure to send it my way.

Item #1: Grey’s Finale

Will Meredith and Derek finally end the on-again/off-again romantic dance and commit already? Certainly the challenges of being a couple can provide drama and comedy, if it didn’t, then Mad About You would’ve been canceled after its pilot episode. Will Miranda figure out a way to repair her relationship with her estranged husband and reunite her family? Will Christina emerge from her “Like a Virgin”-singing funk? We’ll find out tonight in the Grey’s Anatomy finale. But, as with most bonus-sized finales — tonight’s show is two hours long — they tend to disappoint. Hopefully that won’t be the case tonight. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that nothing totally absurd will happen. Like Gizzie, part II.

Item #2: First-Born Rule-Followers and Their Strict ‘Rents

I KNEW IT! As the oldest child in my own family, I’ve always felt as though it’s harder to be the older kid than the younger one, even when you factor the hand-me-downs into the picture. Now a study in the latest issue of the Economic Journal confirms it.

“The study showed that older siblings were much less likely to drop out of school or, in the case of girls, get pregnant, than the youngest in the family, perhaps because of a lifetime of being held to higher standards,” reported MSNBC. “That stricter parenting style [used with the older child] often shapes the first-born kid into a play-by-the-rules perfectionist.”

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Catch Grey’s Anatomy last week, the episode in which Dr. Miranda Bailey’s toddler got booted out of Seattle Grace’s daycare center for punching a fellow toddler in a dispute involving a graham cracker?

This episode was just one in a long line of episodes which focused on the immense difficulty the Bailey character is having balancing her desire to do some serious medical butt-kicking as Seattle Grace’s chief resident, with the desire of her estranged at-home spouse to spend some time with him and their child. The successful career professional pitted against the resentful at-home spouse who feels neglected.

I discuss this Grey’s Anatomy/working parent story line in my latest Mommy Track’d piece and ask the questions: Do you sympathize with the characters in their struggle? Do you wish there were more workplace flexibility? or is this just the way things are when your kids are little?

Image credit: ABC.

It’s about this science project.

For my third graders.

A couple of weeks ago, the kids came home with an instructional packet which told parents and students that the children were expected to concoct a science experiment of their own design. The students were asked to research the subject they were testing, develop a hypothesis, conduct the experiment and then create a three-fold poster board display to bring to school. The packet included a list of links to educational web sites which purported to explain the scientific method — something about which my children claimed they didn’t learn in school . . . could that possibly be true, or were they not paying attention when the scientific method and experiments were explained?

Despite my hard-and-fast rule that the children will do their own experiments and displays because neither I nor The Spouse are third graders (the third grade teachers do not need to assess work done by thirty- and fortysomethings), this project proved to be a major headache in our over-scheduled household.

Since the assignment came home, I have found myself in the unenviable role of being the Evil Task Master, only I didn’t get a fun whip to literally crack around the house with crisp authority. It seems as though I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time in the past few weeks reminding, cajoling and hounding my twin 9-year-olds to work on this project. I was in Science Project Hell, and the hellishness was only amplified when the Eldest Boy refused to focus on his experiment, becoming easily distracted by his younger sibling who was running around the house in his Paul Pierce jersey cheering for the Boston Celtics in playoff games, rooting for the Red Sox or just wildly swinging one of his Star Wars light sabers in close proximity of the experiments in order to get attention.

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As I drove my boys to church Sunday morning, we passed some baseball fields. There, on those fields, were Little League players, coaches and parents gathering for the annual (re-scheduled) Opening Day festivities. A parade of this year’s players and coaches was to be followed by a ceremony and then an all-day mini-carnival.

And my kids were not going to be a part of the parade and ceremony.

We were going to church, despite the fact that my two sons play Little League and The Spouse coaches them both. When they started squawking about why there were kids gathered in uniform and they weren’t among them, I informed my kiddos that we were going to miss Opening Day this year because their father and I had Sunday school teaching obligations in their classrooms and, in fact, their dad and sister were already at church.

Had Opening Day gone on as originally scheduled, I explained, everything would’ve worked out fine. Both The Spouse and I made special arrangements to have our teaching slots covered and were prepared to chose baseball over church on that particular morning. But then it rained. And Opening Day was re-scheduled for another Sunday morning, during which we were slated to teach. After a long talk, The Spouse and I decided that we didn’t feel right about trying to worm out of teaching at church again - we had rescheduled another previous Sunday slot to accommodate a beloved family member’s 90th birthday party - so we decided that, after attending Opening Day ceremonies for three years in a row, it wouldn’t kill us to skip it this time.

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The cover story of this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine was dedicated to the issue of the serious, negative health implications for girls who specialize in a sport at a young age. (Think: Bum knees by the time the girl’s 30.)

I’ve long been an opponent of over-the-top youth sports leagues and coaches pressuring kids to specialize and having families’ lives overtaken by sports.

My kids play sports — one sport a season, with the exception of my daughter’s 9-month-long, once-a-week gymnastics class —  but I feel as though I’m fighting a losing battle against what writer Jen Singer dubbed the “Youth Sports Cartel” which places crazy demands on young players and their parents. (A sassy mom with whom I was recently complaining on the sidelines of a Little League game joked that we should start our own “Slow Sports” movement, in the same vein as the slow cooking movement.)

Now, after reading this article, I have more ammo for my argument that the youth sports world has gone batty. To read my take on this New York Times article, visit my book blog, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum.

Do you think we’ve gone over the top when it comes to youth sports? Is youth sports specialization prominent in your community?

Image credit: New York Times Magazine.

I was literally aghast when I read this Philadelphia Magazine article last month about mothers who were trotting their daughters, as young as 8 years old, to salons for hair coloring sessions, microdermabrasion and bikini waxes (when there’s nothing to wax down there).

So I opted to lampoon it in my May P&K Magazine column where I argue that if so-called reasonable adults think a bikini wax for a second grader is appropriate, then they shouldn’t be leaving their sons out of this beauty mania and should be treating them to mani-pedis and preventative Rogaine treatments.