Picket Fence Post

My fifth graders are going to start middle school this fall and, because they’re my oldest kiddos, I attended a recent principal’s coffee where parents of incoming sixth graders were given a tour of the middle school and a primer about middle school life.

Among the handouts parents were given was a pamphlet that provided moms and dads with advice on how to help make our child’s academic experience in middle school a positive one.

So where’s the “Friday Funny” in this, you may be asking. It was in the pamphlet’s seventh tip: “Encourage your child to keep his/her locker tidy — feel free to come in after school with your child to clean out unwanted items.”

This is one step removed from this kind of helicopter parenting advice: “Please meet your child in the cafeteria at his/her designated lunch time in order to properly cut the child’s foods into bite-sized pieces so the student does not choke. In the event of choking, you should be pre-certified in the Heimlich Maneuver and execute the maneuver if given permission by the lunch room monitor to do so. Your certificate must be on file in the office before entering the cafeteria.”

Actually, that one about cutting up a kid’s food and being certified in the Heimlich Maneuver was not included among the tips, but seriously, asking parents to clean out their kid’s locker is ridiculous.

When I posted this on my Facebook page, I was delighted to read some of the responses from my friends:

“Just bring a scraper, some diluted hydrochloric acid and proper protective gear. And proper containment apparatus,” one wrote.

Another added, “And a wheelbarrow for all the papers not brought home.”

A current college student who attends the university where I used to teach, provided the most salient response when he wrote, “If my mom came to school to clean out my locker it would have probably taken until college for me to forgive her.”

Image credit: School Outfitters.

Just saw the trailer for a new documentary (not yet released) called Babies which follows four babies in four different continents (one was in San Francisco) during their first year of life. Looks fascinating, though the folks who think all babies should be encased in bubble wrap will likely be appalled by the trailer.

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: Time Magazine Takes on Helicopter Parenting

Recently, my twin fifth graders were given an assignment to create hats which represented a vocabulary word they’d been given. As the deadline for them to bring the word hat into school neared, I asked them two things: Did they need me to get them any supplies and how they were progressing. Other parents, I later learned, took a MUCH more involved role in the creation of their kids’ hats, helping the children come up with phenomenal ideas on how to graphically and physically represent a word’s meaning in hat form.

After The Eldest Boy told me about how awesome some of the other kids’ hats were – the ones who got help from a proud parent — I wondered if I was a lazy slacker mom for not suggesting more ideas and for not helping my children create more intricate hats. (I simply let them think it through and execute their ideas on their own.) Or was I, by my insistence that they do the project themselves, engaging in my own, small form of civil disobedience by refusing to hover over my kids?

Time Magazine would say that I was bucking the fear-driven helicopter parenting trend and actively participating in the backlash against it with my inaction.

In her story, “Can These Parents Be Saved,” Nancy Gibbs wrote in Time:

“. . . [T]here is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads. The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they’ll fly higher. We’re often the ones who hold them down.

A backlash against overparenting had been building for years, but now it reflects a new reality.”

God, I hope that’s true. The backlash hasn’t quite reached my own little Boston area suburban hamlet yet; my 11-year-olds’ teachers still want parents to sign off on far too many homework assignments — indicating that mom or dad has seen the assignments or that the kid completed something — a fact about which I loudly complain on a daily basis. But my fingers remain crossed as I wait for this movement to land here. Underparenters unite!

Item #2: NYT Tackles Rudeness at Holiday Dinners

Right in line with my upcoming 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card (see Item #3 below for my plea for you to help me out), today’s New York Times has a story featuring horror stories of rude relatives — of the ilk I’d love to see appear on my Bingo card — from people who’ve survived Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with their extended families and lived to laugh about it, because, seriously, what else can you do but laugh? (Laugh and pass the wine, I suppose. Or write memoirs about it. Or columns, blogs.)

One anecdote from the Times story involved a teacher who was pregnant with  her first child when she spent Thanksgiving at her in-laws’ house:

“For months, the teacher’s mother-in-law had been saying that she wanted to be in the waiting room when the teacher went into labor, and the teacher, who recounted her story on the Mothers-in-Law Anonymous section of Grandparents.com, had been politely rebuffing her.

So at Thanksgiving dinner, with the family gathered around the table, the mother-in-law (referred to on this site as ‘MIL’) took the matter into her own hands.

‘MIL announced to me and the entire family the following,’ the teacher wrote. ‘I WILL be in the waiting room while [daughter-in-law] is in labor, and all of you are welcome to come too. MY SON will come and give me updates every hour on the hour.’”

That’s EXACTLY the kind of thing I’m looking for to include on my Bingo card . . .

Item #3: Send in Your Holiday Anecdotes

Don’t forget, I’m counting on you. I’m collecting your amusing family holiday anecdotes (like the one above) to help me fill the squares on my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. I won’t reveal identities if you don’t want me to, so please feel free to e-mail me (meredithobrien@hotmail.com) a brief explanation of a humorous/insane/annoying instance which occurred at a family holiday event (like Thanksgiving). The people who submit the four best submissions will net signed copies of my collection of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum.

Image credit: Hugh Kretschmer/Time.

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: Golden Smiles

The U.S. Women’s Soccer team triumphantly won gold this week at the Beijing Olympics. Not only did they emerge victorious, the players — whose ranks included moms of young kiddos – inspired a whole new generation of soccer players, as you can see by the beautiful photo to the left. Makes ya want to cheer, “U-S-A!”

Item #2: Parents Followin’ College Kids

The New York Times ran a story that I found disturbing. It was about a mini “trend” among parents who, once their offspring goes away to college, decide to buy a second home in the town where their kid is attending school:

“. . . [S]ome parents are investing in college towns in an unexpected new way: they’re following their kids to college. From South Bend, Ind., to Oxford, Miss., from Hanover, N.H., to Knoxville, Tenn., they are buying second homes for themselves near campuses where their children are enrolled.

Many, like [M.J. and Jim Berrien], want front-row seats to watch their family athletes perform. Some seek a gathering place for football games or family holidays. Others long for a retreat with the amenities of a college town — and why not the one where they have children attending?”

One of the parents said she’d “been seduced” by a college town, while another said the college community would make “an ideal retirement place.” Some said that their kids (and their kids’ friends) are thrilled with having access to the home, free laundry plus home-cooked meals parents cook when they’re in town.

Helen E. Johnson, author of Don’t Tell Me What to Do, Just Send Money:The Essential Parenting Guide to the College Years, told the paper that she hopes parents are buying the homes for the “right reasons,” and urged them to seriously ponder the answers to these questions: “Would I like to be in this town even if my child wasn’t?” and “Does this have more to do with my need than theirs?” Then she threw in this killer line, “You might be making your child more fragile, not less.”

Another contrarian opinion was voiced by DenYelle Keynon of the University of South Dakota who has studied “the parent-student relationship” once the kid goes to college. She told the Times: “Research has found that the parent-child relationship grows better once the child has left the house. Parents should be careful not interrupt that process.”

Ouch.

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