Picket Fence Post

Item #1: Primetime Adoption Stories

If you’ve been watching House, 30 Rock and/or Brothers & Sisters lately, you might’ve noticed that they have at least one thing in common: Storylines involving career-oriented women who are seeking to adopt children. Sadly, thus far in the season, none of the fictional women has had any good news to report, and, in at least one case, a woman’s busy work schedule was held against her. I wrote about these primetime adoption stories in a column over on Mommy Track’d.

Item #2: Proposed Ban on Fast Food Ads

Question for the universe: Who buys fast food for young children? The kids, who have no means of getting to McDonald’s and likely don’t have the spare cash for a Big Mac? No, it’s not the 3-year-old toddling down to the local fast food joint on his own. It’s the adults in that 3-year-old’s life who buy him the fatty food. Adults, my friends, can just say, “No,” no matter how many tempting McDonald’s ads the kids see on TV.

In fact the adults can use these ads as teachable moments to explain to their little charges how the folks who created the ads don’t care about children, that they’re just trying to persuade kids to spend their parents’ money and eat things that are bad for them. At the same time, the adults can explain the concept of moderation, that having a burger and fries every once and a while, is fine. If you don’t teach kids about moderation as well as how to say, “No” to tempting advertisements, you’re doing your offspring a disservice as we live in a world that’s saturated with ads and bad food. 

That being said, I, a big First Amendment cheerleader, think it’s unnecessary to enact a ban on fast food advertisements during kids’ programming, no matter what the National Institutes of Health and the National Bureau of Economic Research say in a new study, claiming that if there were a ban on such advertisements, childhood obesity could be cut by 18 percent. (If networks want to voluntarily suspend that type of advertising, that’s their decision.)

“The study measured the number of fast food ads kids watched and found a fast food TV ad ban for children’s programming would reduce the number of overweight children aged 3 to 11 by 18 percent, and for adolescents (12- to 18-year-olds) by 14 percent,” according to Ad Age.

There’s a button on TV remote controls that says “mute” which you can tell your children to push when an ad comes on TV. There are DVDs you could have them watch which are commercial-free. And there’s also another handy button you could also use. It says, “off.”

Item #3: Q&A with Blogging Sisters/Mad Men Fans

I’m so missing Mad Men these days. Sunday nights just aren’t the same. In a moment of missing Don Draper & Co., I decided to e-mail two sisters in the NYC area who blog about Mad Men on their witty site, Basket of Kisses (a reference to Peggy Olson’s genius quip from season one). They fielded several of my questions for my Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum blog Q&A including this one about Betty Draper:

Meredith: Betty Draper: Victim, emblematic of young mothers of her era, or narcissistic and spoiled?

Roberta Lipp, Basket of Kisses: Well, both. She is well educated, and now she is full-time devoted to making her house look sparkling and meals on the table. And I think that Don having a secret identity expands the metaphor of a young woman involved with a closed off man who feels like a stranger. But yes, she is spoiled and narcissistic. She has been taught that looks are a woman’s only value, and she looks like she looks. She has some character traits that I’m not a fan of. But I very much feel Betty’s pain. 

Read the entire Q&A here.

Image credit: Greg Gayne/Fox via TV Guide.

Item #1: Ditching Goody Bags

A blogger on the web site Babble wants birthday party goody bags killed. Dead. Finished. Finito. They’re usually filled with cheap toys, too much candy and promote the gimmes, she said:

“When we’re handed these tokens of participation at the end of the soiree, I am filled with a mixture of angst and anxiety. I immediately start to try to scheme on how to get the colorfully decorated bag out of my daughters’ curious and greedy little hands. A task which I wish could be avoided altogether.”

I’d be all for eliminating goody bags — I didn’t need a goody bag when I was kid to enjoy a party — if all the other parents would agree to cease and desist. I wouldn’t want to go solo on something like this. Every year, I feel great pressure when it comes to putting together the birthday party goody bags. I always try to be very reasonable about what I put in them, but usually, a few days before a party, I start worrying that I’ve been too cheap and that my frugalness will hurt my kids socially. My guilt typically propels me to go to the store to pick up a large bag of processed sugar that’s been molded into Laffy Taffy or Nerds and stuff handfuls of the empty calories into the bags to make them look fuller, bad mother am I.

Item #2: Martha Stewart’s Snarky Kid

Martha Stewart’s kid is all grown up now, swears profusely, and has taken to mocking her mother. On TV. For a paycheck. No lie.

New York Magazine recently ran a long feature piece on the mother-daughter duo focusing on the fact that Alexis Stewart and her sidekick, Jennifer Koppelman Hutt, will be doing a TV show for the Fine Living Network consisting entirely of ridiculing old episodes of Martha Stewart Living, pop-up video style. Alexis and Jennifer, who have a satellite radio show called Whatever, with Alexis and Jennifer, will also be the hosts of the new program called Whatever, Martha, a show endorsed by mama herself.

To give the green light to this puppy, Martha must have skin that’s 10-feet thick.

Check out the promo for the new show here.

Item #3: Suburban Mom’s Political Fix

This has been the wildest presidential campaign I’ve ever seen. And when I’ve asked those who’ve witnessed more campaigns than I what they think, they agree. Without exception. This year, not only will history be made in one way or another on November 4, the election season has been unpredictable and exciting, no matter for which candidate you’re rooting.

So I’ve decided that, with all the media’s focus on the “mom” vote (as if there is one, monolithic “mom” vote, which, of course there isn’t), I decided that my Suburban Mom blog would take on politics (in a bipartisan fashion of course) and start a new, regular feature entitled, the Suburban Mom’s Political Fix. Check back on the Suburban Mom blog for the latest take on the election from your resident suburban mom with caffeine addiction issues.

Image credit: New York Magazine/Alexis Stewart/Getty Images.