Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Controversy Over H1N1 Vaccine Availability

After posting on Facebook the news that this week one of my kids was diagnosed with H1N1 (swine flu), many folks lamented the fact that they’ve been vigorously trying to obtain vaccines for their children but can’t. People are, in a word, pissed.

First of all, the president last week declared that the United States is in a state of emergency when it comes to the swine flu as the media have been hyping the death stats from H1N1 with scary stories of healthy pregnant women and children being fatally stricken with the disease — like the constant, ominus, beating of a drum — and making it seem as though the plague is awaiting us on our front stoops.

Secondly, there’s been an unforeseen production shortage of H1N1 vaccines, vaccines for which the Centers for Disease Control is urging parents of young children and pregnant women to obtain. And, in the midst of this federal-government-declared emergency, there’s currently not enough of the vaccine to go around right now.

Third, another unseemly factor was thrown into the mix this week: The government has been releasing dosages of the hard-to-find H1N1 vaccine to various groups including corporations, a practice they typically utilize to distribute the seasonal flu vaccines every year. However when people read the news that Wall Street banking and trading companies like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are obtaining doses of H1N1 vaccines (for which the companies had previously ordered from health officials) while other groups like pediatricians and ob/gyns don’t have enough to meet the needs of their high-risk patients, folks get irritated, to put it mildly.

Seeing NBC’s Today Show report below, which says that New York’s Goldman Sachs got as many doses of H1N1 vaccine as an entire hospital (200), you can see how this issue is quickly spiraling into the haves vs the have-nots, or, as the Today Show put it, Wall Street vs Main Street, yet again:

Item #2: Dads Are Important

While this news story falls into the, “Well, yeah, of course, you idiot” category, I found some of the points made in the New York Times’ piece, “Fathers Gain Respect From Experts (And Mothers)” — about how having dads around is important to children — are worth mentioning. The story said that institutionally, dads feel excluded from places where parents and children gather because the physical environment and the practices utilized by staff in such locations are geared toward children and mothers, sending clear signals that taking care of the kiddos is for mothers, not fathers.

“The walls in family resource centers are pink, there are women’s magazines in the waiting room, the mother’s name is on the files, and the home visitor asks for the mother if the father answers the door,” a University of California Berkeley psychology professor told the Times. “It’s like fathers are not there.”

This happens all the time in schools as well when there’s an assumption that the volunteers for school-related tasks will be women, hence the phrase “room mothers.” (I’ve yet to hear anyone invoke the phrase “room fathers.”) One time The Spouse volunteered to be a chaperone for one of our kids’ field trips and, after the chaperones had been selected, a note was sent home saying that I had been among those chosen volunteers to go on the trip, when it was The Spouse’s name that had been submitted.

Additionally, the Times story pointed out that, in order to allow children to benefit from their relationships with their fathers, mothers need to back off and stop micromanaging everything. The paper paraphrased a child psychologist as saying, “Fathers tend to do things different . . . but not in ways that are worse for their children. Fathers do not mother, they father.”

Item #3: Parents Should Back Off Kids’ Homework

Speaking of backing off, syndicated columnist Betsy Hart asserted in a new essay that she doesn’t think it’s necessary for parents to micromanage their children’s homework assignments and drill the children to prepare them for tests, especially in the younger grades. The mother of four believes that her children should learn how to manage their schoolwork, and, when they fail to do so, learn from the consequences fo their failure. An excerpt:

“I worry that if a parent is stressing about [his or her child's] tests and advanced placement in the third grade, these might be the same parents who are literally checking in on a child’s tests and assignments in college on a regular basis. Or even going to job interviews with a grown child after he gets his degree.

But once again the older I get, the more wisdom it turns out my mother had. When it comes to what we do for our kids, she would say, so often less is more.”

Item #1: Mama/paparazzi

Are you a charter member of the mama/paparazzi? Do you stalk your offspring with all manner of AV equipment in order to chronicle every second of their little lives?

I used to be camera and video happy, in what seems like another lifetime ago, when my twins were babies and then toddlers. When kid number three arrived, we took photos and videos of all three of them up until around the time the youngest started pre-school. Then there was a precipitous drop off in the amount of video and still imagery The Spouse and I made of our children. Now, we usually only pull the cameras out when there’s an event, like a school concert or birthday party. Whereas I used to keep current with my scrapbooks up until a few years ago, right now, I’m still not even done with the 2007 family scrapbook. Things have definitely slowed down as far as pictures and videos are concerned. We’re being more selective about what images we make or record on video.

But in some quarters, the mama/paparazzi don’t let up and continue snapping the photos and taking the videos, as columnist Betsy Hart describes in her latest column:

“My brother aptly refers to such mob scenes of camera-toting parents as ‘the mom-and-paparazzi.’ They are everywhere. I still marvel when I see them at neighborhood block parties snapping their cameras as their 4-year-old child comes down the slide or jumps in a bouncy house. Are they really going to keep and look at all these photos anyway?”

Have you found your photo- and video-taking habits changed as your kids have gotten older? Remained the same? Do you upload every kid-related video to YouTube?

Item #2: Smothered Mothers

Over on Mommy Track’d (Full disclosure: I’m a contributing columnist there) author Leslie Morgan Steiner talks about how she’s hoping, really hoping, now that the New York Times has declared that the era of helicopter parenting is nearly over (*laughing, serious belly laughing, some scattered knee slapping*) that perhaps the era of obsessively judging other parents will be ending soon as well. Noting the Times’ observation that there’s backlash against helicopter parenting, Morgan Steiner wrote:

“. . . In addition to the damage inflicted upon kids by uber-hovering, we moms are the biggest victims . . . The pressure to micromanage our children in the name of good parenting is a trend, not a truth. The only truth is loving your children, caring for them as best you can, and scraping together a little (or a lot) of fun along the way.”

A-freakin’-men.

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Item #1: Kid-Sick Parents

Read any of the slew of news stories recently about “kid-sick” parents who, when sending their children off to sleep-away camp, insist on constant communication with their kids and, in some cases, flouted the camp “no cell phone” rules by smuggling a phone into their offspring’s stuff? Well I have, and so has syndicated columnist Betsy Hart, the host of the “It Takes a Parent” radio show. She had me on as a guest to discuss what she calls the “Over-Tethered Generation.” You can listen to the show and sparkling conversation (at one point I use the pithy phrase “going all 007″) here.

Item #2: Tiger Beat

I had no idea that Tiger Beat magazine was still being published. To me, Tiger Beat means Shawn Cassidy, Rick Springfield and Mark Hamill. It resurrects a variety of memories involving flavored Bonnie Bell lip gloss, rainbow shoelaces for my hard Nike sneakers, a large comb sticking out of the right back pocket of my Jordache jeans and chewing multiple pieces of Bubble Yum.

To my daughter, however, who literally squealed when she spotted a Tiger Beat in the local drugstore this week and begged me to buy it – with all my nostalgia, how could I not? — Tiger Beat means the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato & the Camp Rock crew, some teen named Selena, the ubiquitous Miley Cyrus and, of course, the cast of High School Musical I, II and XXIV: The Social Security Years.

At the time of this post, posters of the aforementioned folks have been tacked all over her bedroom walls, alongside an inspirational, framed gymnastics poster I put up and the framed HSM poster I tastefully placed in just the right location in her room. It now looks like a Tiger Beat explosion in there, distinctly un-Pottery Barn Kid. Her ‘tweens have officially arrived.

Item #3: Obama Girls’ Crazy Sked

Any regular reader of the Picket Fence Post is familiar with my vociferous objections to over-stuffed kids’ schedules and the havoc those schedules wreak on family life. (As the beginning of the boys’ first football season creeps nearer — with four practices/week starting in August — I’m already getting the dry heaves about having to get them to everything on time while trucking my daughter to her travel soccer stuff. Oh, and have my own personal and work life.)

So when I read an AP story about the extra-curricular schedule for Michelle and Barack Obama’s girls — ages 10 and 7 — I was astonished. While Michelle Obama does have her mother at home to help her with the girls when Michelle is campaigning for her husband’s presidential bid, and Barack is busy on a global odyssey, imagine trying to keep up this kid schedule with everything else that’s going on with the Obama family: Piano and tennis lessons for both girls; soccer, dance and drama for the 10-year-old and gymnastics and tap for the 7-year-old.

Just reading that list — and knowing that Dad is never home and Mom has massive campaign obligations — I can’t help but wonder how in the world they accomplish all of this with just the help of one grandma.

Item #4: Girls & Math

Forget that stupid talking Barbie doll which years ago uttered, “Math class is tough.” A new study commissioned by the National Science Foundation says that, when it comes to boys and girls there is parity in their achievements. “The researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems,” wrote Tamar Lewin in the New York Times. “They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.”

A study co-author told the Times: “Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance . . . But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.”

So let’s take up the cause and send our girls the message that they’re just as good as boys in the numbers and E=MC squared arena. You go (calculate) girls.

Image credit: Associated Press.