Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Teacher Gifts

I thought we were in a recession, marked by high unemployment and people cutting back as they try to ride out these days of TARP and discussions of another possible federal stimulus package as industries wither away (auto, newspaper, etc.). So why did I read in the Boston Globe that Massachusetts school districts feel the need to warn parents against giving their children’s teachers “pricey” gifts? The story began as follows:

“School superintendents across the region are penning letters this holiday season to parents, cautioning them against going overboard with gift-giving to teachers, principals, and other staff members.

. . . While acknowledging that parents’ gift-giving gestures may be well intentioned the superintendents say that the state’s new ethics laws forbids public servants, including teachers on public payrolls, from receiving gifts with value in excess of $50. Violations are subject to civil penalties, the superintendents warn.”

Some of the examples of previous parental gift-giving excess, according to the Globe, were: $200 gift cards, fine wines, sports tickets, Rolex watches and HD TVs.

Hold on a sec, I thought. Who in the heck is giving teachers gifts that go for $50, never mind the ones the Globe was calling “pricey?”

Are people at your kids’ schools dishing out major cash for gifts?

Item #2: Decade of Overparenting

As part of its ode to the decade of the 2000s that’s about to come to a close, New York Magazine has a piece by writer Sandra Tsing Loh describing this past 10 years as a period of time when “Everybody Else Knows Best,” at least when it came to parenting, as parents have felt under siege by the volume of child-rearing advice. Tsing Loh focused on an anecdote involving her friend, the mother of a 9-month-old who won’t sleep. The friend didn’t know what to do about her son’s sleeping issues and fretted that she would make a mistake. Tsing Loh put a stake into the notion of relying on so-called parenting “experts” to tell us what we should do at every moment of our children’s young lives. Worth the read.

Item #3: Pregnancy Discrimination on ‘Housewives’

Desperate Housewives has had an irritating Lynette Scavo-centric storyline this season, one in which the fortysomething mom of four — who’s pregnant with twins, whose husband has gone back to college and she’s the only breadwinner — is being discriminated against by Carlos Solis, her boss/neighbor/friend, so much so, that after she was unjustly fired, she felt compelled to sue him.

She didn’t tell Carlos — who openly told her that he’d discriminated against another woman and not given her a promotion because she was pregnant and instead gave the promotion to Lynette —  immediately after she found out she was pregnant, but made arrangements, trained an underling and landed a big account so that she wouldn’t leave Carlos in the lurch. But when he found out (not from her) he acted as though, by getting pregnant, she’d let him down and hurt him, and that he was justified in forcing her out of a job.

This fictionalized version of pregnancy discrimination is the focus of my Mommy Tracked column this week, where Lynette’s situation is being played for laughs. I also asked readers what a woman in Lynette’s situation could/should do. (See video from the latest episode below for an example of Lynette being treated shabbily by Carlos’ wife Gabby.)

By the way, after this past week’s plane crash on Wisteria Lane, I began to wonder if this particular (fictional) street in Fairview is the most dangerous street in America. The results of my curiosity can be found here, where I documented every violent/criminal act that I could find that has occurred on Wisteria Lane over Desperate Housewives’ half dozen seasons. If I’ve missed any, please feel free to let me know.

 Item #1: ‘Screaming is the New Spanking’

A feature story telling readers that parents yell at their kids is akin to a story that says there will be a sunrise tomorrow morning. Unless you know only mellow,uncaffeinated, really Zen-like folk, you, or someone you know, has yelled at a kid. It’s not like this is a new trend, this shouting at irrational small people who like to push their parents’ buttons and nag you until your ears bleed. However the New York Times’ Style section ran a feature story this week which asserted that “screaming is the new spanking.”

As author Hilary Stout outlined how spanking has fallen out of favor (or is only done in super-top-secret for fear of ostracizing), she suggested that today’s parents have simply replaced spanking with shouting. “. . . [W]ith regularity, this is a generation that yells.” [Emphasis was NOT added by me. It was in the paper that way.]

Stout quoted a parenting coach as saying:

“This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it’s not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don’t work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again.”

Do you think that GenXers yell at their kids more than parents did in the past? (I vote, “No.”)

Item #2: Pop Warner Scuffle

Speaking of screaming . . .

Did you get a load of the story this week about a Massachusetts dad who got peeved that his son’s Pop Warner football coach told the man’s 12-year-old son to run laps because the father had brought him to practice 10 minutes late? The dad started allegedly shouting a few things to the coach about his weight from the sidelines, according to news reports, at which point the coach allegedly suggested they meet in a secluded spot, where, police say the coach beat the father up. The dad wound up with a busted eye socket and other injuries and the coach was busted for assault.

What crossed my mind when I read this story? Putting aside the alleged taking of verbal pot shots — which the dad should NOT have done — and the alleged actual assault which, obviously, shouldn’t have happened either, it seems to me that some people take youth sports too seriously. This is sports for kids. Children.

I’ve had a kid who was on a sports team where the coach said he wanted to teach parents a lesson by making their kids run laps if the parents brought the kids late to practices. The kids aren’t in control of getting themselves to practice at this age, therefore I don’t think they should be held responsible for something that’s beyond their control.

When my kid told me about this new behavior modification technique by the coach, I responded by telling my child that I have three kids who all play sports, my own work obligations and a ton of other responsibilities outside of my kids’ recreational activities which The Spouse and I fund. I do the best that I can to get everyone where he or she needs to go on time. If you’re 10 minutes late for practice because I accidentally ran late, so be it. Running’s good for you.

(more…)

I’ve always had a soft spot for Felicity Huffman’s character Lynette Scavo on Desperate Housewives. In the first season when she was an at-home mom of four, Lynette spoke the sometimes ugly truths about her struggles with parenting small children, her loneliness and how she frequently felt as though she was screwing up at every turn. In season two, she returned to the workforce and was the comedic embodiment of the modern woman’s no-win attempts to balance her career and her home life.

However as the show got older, I found I liked my once favorite character less and less. The writers, I believed, fell down on the job and gave her some pretty cruddy story lines, especially last season’s when one of her kids was arrested. God last season was a bad one for Lynette. She’d become a shell of her former, real mom character.

When the new season began, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Lynette I admired from seasons one and two had returned. Now, she’s back working as an advertising executive who’s found herself pregnant again with twins, and she’s feeling distinctly ambivalent about the pregnancy, something not many folks would admit in public. And Lynette  seems to have regained some of the spark she’d lost.

Below is a scene from the season premiere where she was in an ob/gyn’s waiting room and brought a first-time pregnant mom to tears. The old Lynette is back, baby.

I blog weekly about the latest Desperate Housewives’ episodes at Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum. My review of the most recent episode, “Being Alive,” can be found here.

Okay, so we’re all aware that the economic news is downright depressing these days. Some times, I just don’t want to know how much the Dow dropped in a given day or how many more thousands of jobs just evaporated.

And with all this worrying and people holding onto their wallets more tightly, it’s only natural that folks would start to hunker down in their houses and not go out as much. Broadcasting & Cable just reported that TV viewing is up, with the average viewer watching 151 hours/month compared to 140 hours/month in 2008 and 145 hours/month in 2007.

This got me wondering for my Pop Culture column at Mommy Track’d this week: What are moms with young kids watching on TV these days? I talked to nine Bay State moms, with kids ages 2-10, to find out.

TV shows mentioned most by the moms: Grey’s Anatomy, Friday Night Lights, The Office, 30 Rock, Desperate Housewives, The New Adventures of Old Christine, Private Practiceand Brothers & Sisters.

What are YOU watching?

Image credit: ABC.

Years ago, I wrote a column that somewhat embarrassed The Spouse. It asked one, central question: How do sleep deprived parents of young children enjoy “private time” together? (And those moments at midnight, when you’re both exhausted and about to fall asleep, didn’t count. The key word here is “enjoy.”)

After taking an informal survey of my friends at the time, I learned that many of them had invested in solid bedroom door locks and took advantage of the fact that their kids would be transfixed by the TV, so they kept a variety of videos and DVDs that their kids liked on hand, hoping that the glow of the TV would maintain their children’s interest and keep them away from Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom for a little while, say, 10 minutes. In addition to those suggestions, friends also offered horror stories of getting caught in the act by their children, every parents’ nightmare scenario.

I’ve never really seen that horrifically awkward moment depicted well on TV. Until this past Sunday night, when Desperate Housewives – in the midst of a major creative comeback – had a storyline about Gabby and Carlos Solis being observed by their daughter Juanita, whom they initially told that they’d been wrestling. It was priceless. And funny.

The other parental intrusion scene I’ve seen recently happened on Mad Men – during an episode called “Three Sundays” — when two grade school-aged offspring barged in on their parents, Don and Betty Draper. When asked what they were doing, their father shouted, “Sleeping!”

The link to the Desperate Housewives’ video is here, but DO NOT WATCH it with kids around or when they’re within earshot. Trust me on this.

Item #1: Stone Soup Book

I love the way cartoonist Jan Eliot’s mind works. In her Stone Soup comics, she’s able to put into pictures what I labor to do with words. So, a few months ago, when Eliot e-mailed me to ask me if I’d write a blurb for her new collection of cartoons, This Might NOT Be Pretty, I felt honored.

“Jan Eliot has been spying on my family,” reads the blurb I wrote that’s on the back cover of Eliot’s newly-released book, the seventh in the Stone Soup series. “There’s no other explanation why Stone Soup so accurately captures the absurdly realistic yet painfully funny antics that go on in my house. Stone Soup is a window into the gloriously flawed American family.”

The book’s great for when you need to know that you’re not the only one who, as you’re raising your children, finds yourself in patently preposterous situations.

Item #2: ‘Desperate Housewives’ Trailer

Season five of Desperate Housewives, a once razor-sharp satire of modern life in the ‘burbs, is on the horizon. (Premieres September 28.) This season the show shifts five years into the future where everything has supposedly changed for the Wisteria Lane residents, most markedly for Eva Longoria’s character Gabby Solis, now a non-glamorous mother of two, while some of Felicity Huffman’s character’s kids are now teens and on a first name basis with the friendly folks at the local juvenile detention center.

Huffman has said that the half-decade time jump has invigorated Desperate Housewives’ writers and that the characters’ slate of stories has been wiped clean. I certainly hope so. The show has lost its mojo in recent years and just hasn’t been as good as it was in season one and early on in season two. I hope it can redeem itself. And soon. I’m rooting for Huffman.

Item #3: Tonight’s Historic Moment

Regardless of your political affiliation or for whom you plan to cast your vote for president in November, there is no question that tonight’s speech by Illinois Senator Barack Obama formally accepting his party’s nomination for president is a historic one for our country, particularly coming on the 45th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That’s the iconic speech our children are shown in their classrooms every January, the one they hear when they learn about the condition of race relations in the 1960s when King spoke and why the Civil Rights Act was eventually passed.

Fast-forward four decades later, and you can now explain to your own kiddos with pride how far our country has come from that moment to this one. This is a moment they’ll want to remember.

Image credit: Amazon.com/Stone Soup.