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Dr. Seth Pollak: PBS' 'This Emotional Life': Are We Born With 'Innate' Ideas?

2009-12-31T12:30:00Z

I've spent many years studying children's behavior, trying to better understand how "nature" and "nurture" impact human development and the role of social experience on brain development. Some of this science is featured in the upcoming PBS series, This Emotional Life (airing next week, January fourth through sixth on PBS).

In a relatively short period of time, our society has radically shifted our collective view of childhood--just over a generation ago, the maxim was that children "should be seen and not heard," reflecting relatively little interest in early childhood. Now a great deal of media attention, marketing, and adult conversation is centered about questions regarding the best approaches to parenting. This is a double-edged sword. In some ways, parenting has become a competitive sport, with adult's perceptions of their own competence too closely tied to their children's performance. On the other hand, it does appear to be the case that early childhood is important for human development, and adult attention to the needs of children has lead to improvements in children's health and education. As a scientist, I spend a lot of time studying how and what children are learning as they interact with their parents and others.

The hot button issue in child development concerns what is "innate" or what sorts of information, traits, and tendencies are already in our brains from the moment we are born. The idea that we enter the world with lots of skills and knowledge is an old and very attractive idea. But my own view is more of a vanilla ice-cream approach. Rather than lots of fancy features, it is likely that what humans enter the world with is a general ability to learn. We have an amazing ability to be able to pick up on various things that are happening in the environment and remember them and group them together. As a result of these very, very powerful abilities to learn, what we're able to do is master lots of different complex behaviors--reading emotions, understanding basic physics, decoding language. If human infants are indeed born with highly effective learning abilities, when we're interacting with our children we are teaching them.

When we are forming our earliest relationships, such as forming social bonds or attachments -- what we are doing is learning. We are learning how to signal to others when we need help for hunger or pain or fear; we are learning who responds to our needs, and how consistently those people respond. As we become older, we learn more complex social cues: what makes other people upset; what makes them comforted; what will result in punishment; what will result in reward. I believe that our brains are born ready to learn about emotional cues...but all that learning depends upon the kinds and quality of social experiences that we have had. These experiences turn on different sets of genes, tune our attention to different aspects of our social world, and imbue our experiences with meaning.

So as a parent I try and step back and ask myself whether I am making these learning experiences clear to my children. Am I being consistent? Have I tried to show my children a clear link between what they have done and why I am upset? Social life is very complex for young children. It can be very easy for adults to forget that they are trying to learn based upon very little information...sort of like trying to communicate in a second language: it helps when people speak slowly and clearly and simply at first.

The big picture is that children are very active learners. Learning does not mean just numbers and letters. It also means learning about relationships. We have to learn how to communicate to others how we feel, how to read the signals that others are sending to us ... and even more daunting, how to regulate our feelings and behaviors when interacting with others. The building blocks of complex emotions such as love stem from this type of back and forth between two people, parent and child. Being able to recognize what somebody else is feeling, recognize that your needs are met, recognize that you've met somebody else's needs. This interplay is really at the core of a reciprocal relationship.

As a parent, what I try to do is to use situations as moments to help children master social communication, love, understanding, empathy because these are not things we are born with, they are skills that emerge with practice. Do I do this all the time? When we are late for school, and the lunches are not made, and the kids want a cereal that we've run out of, no one is putting on their snow pants, and a glove is missing, and I have not had my morning coffee well, that's not so much a teachable moment as it is just trying to make it through the moment.

Allison Gilbert: Parentless Parents: Time Is Running Out

2009-12-30T12:57:00Z

There are only two more days to be part of the first online survey ever conducted about being a parentless parent. It's called the Parentless Parent survey and I have been writing about some of the preliminary findings right here on the Huffington Post. The survey will be closed beginning January 1, 2010. Click here to take it.

One of the most surprising findings I've come across so far is just how isolated many parentless parents feel and how few turn to others for help. More than 75 percent of all mothers and fathers who have taken the P arentless Parents survey so far say they don't belong to any organization, religious institution, or community group that provides support to them as a parent. That's surprising when you consider the upside. Here's how some respondents have characterized participating in various groups:

"It makes me feel like I'm not the only one who feels that way."

"Opening up about my fears and insecurities of being a parent and having others tell me they experience the same things has helped the most."

"It's so freeing not to have to explain to someone who can't possibly understand."

Where do you turn for support? Would getting more involved be a viable New Year's resolution? Let me know in the comment section below. You can also join the discussion by taking the Parentless Parents survey. I'll use your anonymous responses in my book. Again, this is your last chance to take the Parentless Parent survey. The survey will be closed as of January 1, 2010.

***

Allison Gilbert is currently writing her third non-fiction book, Parentless Parents: How the Deaths of Our Mothers and Fathers Impact the Way We Parent Our Own Children. If you are a parent who has lost both your parents, you can help with her research by taking the Parentless Parents online survey. You can also join the "Parentless Parents" community on Facebook.

Parentless Parents will be published by Hyperion and is a follow-up to her critically acclaimed book, Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents. Parentless Parents will explore how the way we parent is shaped by the loss of our own mothers and fathers; how marriages are impacted when one spouse is parentless and the other is not; and offer strategies for keeping the memory of our parents alive for our children.

In Always Too Soon, Ms. Gilbert (a producer at CNN in New York and mother of two children) interviewed celebrities and others about losing their parents. She spoke with, among others, Rosanne Cash, Geraldine Ferraro, Ice-T, Yogi Berra, Mariel Hemingway, and New York Times best-selling authors, Hope Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich. Always Too Soon sparked the formation of the Parentless Parents organization, a national network of support groups for mothers and fathers who have lost their own parents. You can find out more about Ms. Gilbert by visiting her website at www.allisongilbert.com.

Ronald Ricker: Parenting: the Advantage of Listening

2009-12-28T20:03:17Z

The duties of parents are many. We must structure our homes, set rules, expectations, consequences, etc. We all have had different types of parents, different mothers, parenting styles, levels of humor, love, social values, interests, levels of encouragement, empathy, understanding, passion, openness, generosity, structure, predictability, rigidity, etc. These are some of our assets and handicaps.

There is a great deal more to adolescents than "did you clean your room?" There are two arbitrary measurements I will use: "Distance" and "ride". The "distance" our adolescent has traveled can be measured easily -- "Did you clean your room?" "Did you follow the rule?" The "ride" includes the experience of actions, thoughts, and feelings about the same and other activities and feelings.

If one carefully thinks about parenting necessities, they are largely all "distance". That observation tells us little or nothing about the "ride" of our child. The "ride" of each child is different. Decidedly so. So unless we decide that one "ride" equals all "rides", we know that we are as different as night from day from each of our brethren. So it goes with adolescents, they are as different, one to another, as are we. Nevertheless, we often fall back on a simpler solution, that one "ride" describes all adolescents. "They're all crazy". In some respects, the 'ride' is really all that matters. Although we can conjure up all the formulations and theories ("distance") that we wish, it is the "ride" of the adolescent that matters the most. And "rides" are as many as there are adolescents to "ride". Adolescents think and talk about "ride". "Ride" talk to an adolescent by a parent ordinarily means the end of "ride" parenting, and the onset of "distance" rule-making. It is one more sign to the adolescent that he/she is not understood, not respected, and not listened to. "Distance" here is theoretical, a judgment. ("sex is bad") It has nothing to say about the "ride" of the adolescent, in this instance, sex.

Listening
Listening to adolescents often leads to a "dialog" and creates the closeness and openness wished for by most of us. This "dialog" virtually always illuminates the "ride". The "ride" is the adolescent's actual experience of events, thoughts, feelings, etc.

Patience is mandatory. As with all of us, we don't continuously explain how we feel, irrespective of the listener. However, the better the listener the more likely will be the expression of the "ride" and the more often we will grasp the reality of our child.

The adolescent is attempting to state his/her experience in life at that moment. In that sense what they say is always their "truth", even though it may make no or little sense to us. We must try to make sense of the ride of the adolescent, as best we can. They will often explain. We can aim at creating a listening situation. The recognition by the parent that there is a "ride" of their child, is crucial. Grasping this "ride" is the stuff that yields understanding of our adolescent and meaningful parenting and dialoging.

These "rides" are not static, but ever-changing. Obviously each of our adolescents' "rides" in life may appear similar, yet are realistically entirely different. Treated as static, this is another instance, more than likely, of an unheard adolescent, who departs the dialog.

Unheard "rides" are designed for nothing in terms of the dialog between parent and adolescent. Unheard "rides" are both useless and destructive. Destructive in that there is no hearing.

Dr. Wilfred Bion in his book, "2nd Thoughts, Commentary", says "our 'understandings' are only models which must be able to be constantly constructed, discarded, to be replaced by another theory or model, etc." Understandings otherwise derived cannot possibly investigate the truth of our adolescents. To realize the importance of the kind of thinking that goes into this model-making with respect to adolescents cannot be overstated. Models must be made which illuminate our adolescents "ride". In other words, we talk to our adolescent about their present, past or future hoping to further understand their thoughts and help them to understand themselves. Adolescents may seem "all over the place." They're moving, but remain graspable. We must move with them.

Parental learned formulations are often the root of the determination by the adolescents that they are not being listened to, understood and are only being given contrived, theoretical understandings. (Like my father and the bus -- see below). Adolescents often feel, correctly, that what they say are thoughts awaiting the chance to be attached to a theory held by their parents.

Utterly distraught by a failed, first romance in high school (she broke up with me) I told my father, tearfully, of the event and of my overwhelming torment. He said in a moment of great "understanding" and "compassion": "girls are like buses, another will soon be coming down the street." Last I ever asked him on that or any related topic.

It is here that our job as parents expands greatly and likely into the most important and rewarding part of being parents. Adolescents learn about themselves and us, and we about them and ourselves. They become people, not studies in pathology. They are people to be loved, taught, and understood, not always thought of as sex-crazed, drug-addicted, criminals.

SaraKay Smullens: Losing Leumi: A Child's Transitional Object

2009-12-28T15:54:22Z

Is everything going smoothly for you and yours as your transition to the New Year? I do hope nothing serious happened to you and that all celebrations have been and remain happy and "uneventful."

Ours, unfortunately, has been quite EVENTFUL, as our youngest granddaughter, Stella, visiting from Berlin (Germany, not New Jersey) with her parents and sister (and 11 other adult "children" and theirs visiting from DC, NY, and here, Philly) lost her Leumi under our watch. Oy vey!

For those of you who are not following my shorthand, Leumi is Stella's transitional object, which means that it is an object (a stuffed animal, blanket, etc.) which represents a connection to her mother, helping her to endure separation until she learns she can, simply put, endure separation. About 60 percent of little ones insistently claim such an object.

Stella's Leumi, a ragged, torn, small, seemingly dirty (though washed innumerable times) doll that no longer in any way, shape, or form resembles one has been a bed time, nap time, and sad time comforter for as long as I can remember.

I know perfectly rational people who go out on the coldest nights, even sifting through trash, to see where a blankie, or dugie, or something else of enormous importance with a totally ridiculous name could possibly be hiding. My husband, Stan, and I are now two of them.

I know others who have tipped enormous sums to messengers and cabbies when a transitional object is left behind. Stan and I have been two of them for years.

Stella was three years, three months, and 25 days old when catastrophe hit, and the episode belongs in the "no good deed goes unpunished category." All other members of our family had plans, and we arranged for our daughter and son-in-law to have an evening just for themselves. We would plan one for their seven-year-old, Lucy, and Stella.

And so, Lucy, Stella, Stan, and I enjoyed a lovely picnic supper with innumerable goodies in front of the fireplace. We also had tickets to a child friendly movie, "The Princess and the Frog" (great fun!), and planned to be home and have the children asleep before their parents got home.

We found a cab to take us from downtown Philadelphia, where we live, to the theatre in the area of the beautiful, inspiring University of Pennsylvania, an urban community that is rich in vibrancy and diversity. We had so much fun telling our granddaughters that two of their aunts were graduates of the undergrad school, and that one of their aunts and I went to graduate school at Penn. And also that their great grandfather was an alum.

After the film, where popcorn was an extra bonus for all, we had trouble getting a cab back to our Philadelphia apartment. It was close to nine o'clock, and very cold and icy, when luck came our way, and we poured into the cab and buckled in.

My granddaughters have a tradition. They like to take a small pocketbook from my closet and keep Kleenex and chapstick in it. I held Stella's small purse in my larger one throughout the film, but she asked for it in the cab. It was complicated getting out, handling the children, paying the driver, navigating the snow, etc. And when we reached our apartment my husband realized that my purse, the one Stella chose, had most likely dropped to the floor of the cab as we exited.

I was not alarmed, as the purse was unimportant to me. But instantly, my mood changed, as Stella began to cry, telling us that Leumi was in the cab. Which meant that Stella had placed Leumi in the small purse.

As far as I was concerned Leumi was where I had last seen him/her, on my husband and my bed, with toothbrushes, toothpaste, jammies, one pullup, etc., awaiting our return. But a trip outside (explained above) showed me how wrong I was and would remain.

We could not remember the parent taxi fleet. However, in seasonal spirit, I was sure the taxi was red, while Stan was sure it was green, and Lucy remembered blue. As Stella kept telling us sadly (but not hysterically) that Leumi was in the cab, Stan called every Philadelphia cab company, telling each our story. (He also managed to get the number of the city's lost and found for all cabs.)

We explained that perhaps someone took the purse but dumped the "doll" in the cab, and the driver would know to rescue him/her. In retrospect, this was truly faulty reasoning, as Leumi looked more like dirty keenex than anything else. Anyway, we were told by a very sympathetic lost and found contact, a grandfather himself who definitely felt our pain, not to hold our collective breaths. Right he was, for from that day to this Leumi has been gone.

But much to my surprise on that fateful evening Stella went to sleep fine, without Leumi, and her parents did not banish us from babysitting. Not once did either brand us incompetents.

Stella has asked her mother for Leumi one time since this episode (that I know of). Guilt forced me out of hearing distance, and I never asked the response. But Stella found me soon after. She neither growled nor scowled. Instead she asked for a story.

Still I offer the following advice to all parents and grandparents and caretakers: Always have a Leumi/ Blankie/ Ahnie, Dugie backup!

In my heart of hearts, I think that Stella used us to dump Leumi, not needing his/ her
presence any longer.

Still, I wish her decision had been under someone else's watch.

Randall Amster: Schlock Doctrine: Where, and by Whom, Was Your Christmas Made?

2009-12-27T20:40:08Z

Nothing against our friends and neighbors in the Far East, but it seems as if just about everything that came down the chimney for Christmas this year bore a "made in China" label on its underbelly. Even the items that appear to be iconically American in their logos and characters have been shipped here from across the planet. This is the stark reality of globalization.

Children's toys in particular present a unique ethical conundrum. On the one hand, we want our kids to have stimulating new things to play with and expand their repertoires of dexterity and cognizance. On the other hand, we cannot escape the fact that another kid on the other side of the planet might be toiling in a factory somewhere to make the stuff that potentially enhances our kids' lives. This is especially the case when nearly every toy -- even supposedly "green" ones -- seemingly comes from the Middle Kingdom.

Sweatshop labor, of course, is no secret, but it remains something of an abstraction through the insulation of our lives in the West. That fell apart around here this year, when I noticed that some of the boxes in which our purchases arrived had actual names of people next to the "Made by" category inscribed on them. They also listed factory numbers and product designations in many cases as well, such as "Item #2572 of 32525." If it's indeed the case (as Vegan Peace observes) that "the average North American toy maker earns $11 an hour [while] in China, toy workers earn an average of 30 cents an hour," then someone is obviously making a pretty penny on this system just in the rate of labor exchange alone.

These realities have been thoroughly understood for some time now, as evidenced by this 2005 article in which the complexities of the problem are well documented:

"The International Labor Organization (ILO) has estimated that of the 250 million children between the ages of five and fourteen work in developing countries, 61 percent are in Asia. Although we live in an extremely modern age, there is, in fact, child slave labor present in China . Some of these children work in sweatshops. A sweatshop is a workplace where workers are subjected to extreme exploitation, including the lack of a living wages or benefits, poor and dangerous working conditions, and harsh and unnecessary discipline, such as verbal and physical abuse. Sweatshop workers are paid less than their daily expenses, thus they are never able to save any money to invest in their futures. They are trapped in a never-ending cycle."

Disney products specifically have been singled out in the past for their imbrication in this oppressive system. Wal-Mart, which the United Food and Commercial Workers Union notes is "the largest importer of Chinese goods," has repeatedly asserted its innocence in such matters, yet speculation continues. Even some Sesame Street products, which discerning parents will often embrace due to the items' perceived educational qualities and general familiarity, have been implicated in recent years. The full ramifications of this global trade in exploitative toys have not been lost on analysts and activists, including this introduction to a 2008 report from the National Labor Committee:

"In China , the busy toy season is already in full swing as thousands of factories work around the clock churning out millions of holiday toys, which will start arriving in the United States and Europe by September. Like last year and the years before, the American people will spend over $21 billion on 3.6 billion toys this holiday season. At least 85 percent of these toys are made in China by three million mostly young women workers toiling long hours in 8000 factories. And these are only the factories that have export licensees, leaving aside the many smaller subcontract toy plants."

There are certainly many alternatives for purchasing products with greater ethical standards (the website Vegan Peace, among other sources, provides links to a number of them). But let's face it -- parents are busy, disposable incomes are tight, children need stimulation, time is money, and this is America. In other words, even with the best of intentions, it's a great challenge to be purists in our parenting. Furthermore, most folks out there don't give these issues a second thought at all, leaving the few making more deliberate choices merely a small drop in a high-volume bucket. Finally, there really isn't a foolproof, diplomatic way to fully screen out gifts from well-meaning others.

And then, inevitably, the stuff will soon break. I estimate about a one-month shelf life for any new toy given to a child under five. Some items retain functionality with missing buttons and lost pieces, whereas many others wind up in landfills -- or, in a feat of wonderful irony, recycled and shipped back to China to be turned into more short-term consumer goods. Thus, in many cases, the things we buy are almost literally garbage.

The most apropos description of this cycle of inherent decrepitude is perhaps the Yiddish word schlock, meaning something "cheap, shoddy, or inferior." While I would love to claim sole authorship of the ironic phrasing in the title of this piece, it has actually appeared previously in a few places, including in an amusingly caustic critique of Naomi Klein's persuasive book The Shock Doctrine in which she argues that capitalism foments and (of course) capitalizes upon crises, thus cleverly making a buck both coming (i.e., problem) and going (i.e., solution). Referring to Klein as "the Ann Coulter of Canada -- a demagogic sycophant who has parlayed her political shtick into a lucrative business," this sophomoric article with its sarcastic mien actually almost got it right in the end:

"We Americans and our evil multinationals, it seems, champion a brand of heartless free-market piracy, which robs the good people of the developing world of the fruits of their labor, and forces them to toil in hot, miserable working conditions, just to make our garments and sneakers. Our big multinationals assimilate or obliterate anything in their path towards global domination."

The author of this 2008 missive likely didn't intend to validate Klein's logic. But to critique a thesis one must be able to articulate it cogently, hence arguing for its utility as a point of critical reference. In a similar sense, the lesson of this holiday season may well be that the ethical implications of our choices are so woven into the fabric of ordinary commerce that we almost can't help but be pulled into orbit around a set of values that most would deem both schlocky and shocking at the same time. And so, in explicating the aesthetic of schlock and its uncritical acceptance among many consumers, perhaps we have uncovered something uniquely "made in America " after all.

Meredith Lopez: Mommy Office Party And My Favorite Holiday Movies

2009-12-23T15:47:54Z

"With what price we pay for the glory of motherhood." - Isadora Duncan

The other day it occurred to me that this is the first year in many that I have no office party to attend. Whether or not I actually went to past office parties is another story altogether, but the fact is that I always worked someplace that had one, should I have chosen to attend.

But no one throws office parties for stay at home moms, or moms of any sort. Unless you count lighting the Juban Princeling's menorah for him and wrapping his approximately 20,000 Christmas gifts, there would be no Holiday party to celebrate what it is I do everyday.

Or so I thought.

The same day that I recognized, and with minimal regret, that I have no office parties to attend this year, I received an invite from a mom in our neighborhood playgroup for a party she was having. Just for moms. A mom office party.

Brilliant!

Don't get me wrong, I love being a mom. I LOVE it. I cherish the fact that I am in a position where I have the choice to stay home with my son. I know too many mothers who have no choice either way: either they have no job to go back to, or they have to work full-time outside the home because their families depend on that paycheck. I know that I'm lucky to get to stay home with the Princeling and that's what I choose to do.

However, I know of very few, if any, Americans who 100% love their jobs 100% of the time. Even my father, who is self-employed in a career he loves, hates certain aspects of his job most of the time, and other aspects of it some of the time.

My job is wonderful. I get to play with my son and watch him learn and explore and develop.

But my job is also smelly and gross and frustrating and exhausting and most days I'm completely wiped out by the time the Princeling goes to bed.

I love being a mother, but it's neither the most glamorous job in the world, nor is it treated with tons of respect. Too many other SAHMs I know apologize when they tell me they don't have a proper Job-job. As if raising children to be intelligent, productive, healthy, happy, considerate citizens of the world is something to be ashamed of, as if it's not enough. "Oh," they tell me when I ask what they do, "I don't work. I just stay home." Right. Like we all sit around watching TV and eating bon-bons all day long.

The working mothers I know run themselves ragged trying to find a "work-life balance" because if they work too much then they are neglectful mothers, but if they don't put in enough hours at the office or at their home business then they are lazy.

I love being a mother, but I not only don't get paid sick leave, but I actually am the one who pays out of pocket when I am sick. The day after I spent a sleepless 5 and 1/2 hours in the ER being treated for severe dehydration due to a stomach bug, I had to pay someone $80 to take the Princeling away for the day so I could get some much-needed sleep. I don't get weekends, or evenings, or vacations. In fact, I haven't had a proper vacation in more than two years, and when I want some time to myself I have to schedule it in advance with my husband to make sure he's home to watch our son.

So yes, I love my job of Mommy, but man, I sure could use an office party!

And that's where my mom friend, Her Majesty the Queen of England (she's British) came in. She graciously and Britishly opened her home to us neighborhood moms for our very own office party. She had a real fireplace with a real roaring fire and a real Christmas tree and real wine. Lots and lots and lots of wine.

I almost didn't get to go. My husband had to work very late, as usual, so my brother was set to come over and babysit that night. But my brother's phone broke that day and he works all the way out in Long Island and would have to stop by the phone store on his way and didn't know if he'd make it in time for me to go to the party. I casually mentioned this to my husband, who lovingly left work early to work from home all evening so I could go. Hooray for awesome husbands!

Thankfully, the Queen lives four blocks away, so I walked there in just a few minutes. I recognized many moms from playgroups we've had together, and met a few moms I knew only from their emails within our October 2008 neighborhood group. I found out that the Queen used to work at the same place my sister-in-law Daria works, and they have a total mutual admiration society for one another. (As Daria said when she found out that I went to a party at the Queen's, "New York City. Smallest big city in the world!")

I caught up with my friend Amanda Doss, whose roller derby team won the Gotham Girls championship last month, and found out that she is a fellow fan of Le Tigre and the Beastie Boys. I swapped picky-eater advice with one of my favorite mom friends. I found out that another mom friend is pregnant, and we all of us discussed whether or not we're ready for more babies yet, or whether or not we'll ever have another one at all. Those moms who work talked about work. We creative types talked about our creative pursuits.

We swapped horror stories of going through - recently or currently - Pukefest 2009, which has hit my entire neighborhood hard. (Though, I'm still the reigning champ because I had to go to the hospital.) One mom friend told me about all the new words her little girl is learning, and I told her how the Princeling loves to touch his private parts whenever his diaper is off. We compared notes on how much, if any, Holiday shopping and wrapping we each have left. (Me: done and done.) We toasted one woman's husband who baked brownies for us. We ate lots of snacks. (I ate three brownies and approximately 17 pounds of blue cheese, some of it on crackers.) We drank a lot of wine.

It was a proper office party, done right and done well, and every single one of us deserved it.

***
Since this is my last post of 2009, here's a little treat for my adoring public (my mom and husband).

Mer's 10 Favorite Holiday Movies of All Time Ever Ever Ever:

10. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Not technically Christmas movies. But my husband and I have a tradition of busting out the special version DVDs and watching them all over three nights at this time of year. And drinking while we watch them. And making fun of everyone's hair.

9. Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas
I mean the original, not the one with Jim Carrey. I don't know what a "roast beast" is, but it sounds delicious.

8. The Santa Clause
Sue me. I'm a sucker for a Santa movie, and this one is just adorable and sweet and shut up.

7. Scrooged!
Bill Murray is freaking hilarious in this, and I love the guy who sings "Feeling Hot, Hot Hot" as the Ghost of Christmas Past. "Charles Dickens would have wanted to see her nipples!"

6. The Nutcracker Ballet, version 1977 starring the American Ballet Theatre and Mikhail Baryshnikov
My mom recorded this when I was a little girl and I watched it every year. This is the gold standard by which I measure all other Nutcrackers. I finally got it on DVD, courtesy of Netflix, to show to my in-laws this year.

5. A Christmas Carol, version 1999 starring Captain Picard.
There are perhaps a gazillion versions of this famous story out there, but my favorite is the one starring the greatest Star Trek captain of all time. Bah humbug, make it so!

4. The Hebrew Hammer
"Shabbat Shalom, mother f******!" A kick-ass Hanukah movie that tells the real story of the Jewish holiday: competition with Christmas. Heh.

3. A Charlie Brown Christmas
Seriously, who doesn't love this movie? Barbarians and terrorists, that's who.

2. A Christmas Story
"You'll shoot your eye out!" I'm that annoying person who still watches this over and over and over on TBS every year.

1. National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation
To me, this movie embodies all the very best and very worst of what it means to celebrate Christmas in modern America. I just can't get enough of this movie. I'll watch it whenever it comes on TV. "If I woke up tomorrow with my head sewn to the carpet I couldn't be more surprised than I am now." Classic!

***
And, that's it for me for 2009. Join me in 2010, won't you, when we'll look forward to such blog topics as: Will I ever get to go on vacation? Will I ever finish writing my novel? How will the Princeling handle swimming lessons next summer? Will my husband and I survive the initial stages of looking for a preschool? Can I convince my Republican friends that health care reform is not one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse? And most of all, just how "terrible" will the Princeling's Terrible Twos actually be?

(And for those of you wondering what the Princeling's real name is and what he looks like and what our apartment looks like, I have a special treat coming up in January.)

Happy Holidays, and a very happy, healthy, and safe New Year to you all!

Amie Newman: Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing

2009-12-23T15:30:00Z

Childbirth educator and documentary filmmaker Vicki Elson likes to say, aside from the typical hospital birth, there are essentially three kinds of births on television:

"One type is a pioneer woman or early Native American just pushing her baby out, no problem. Another type is an accidental birth on an airplane, in a tree, or during a hostage situation. The third type is a planned out-of-hospital birth. These look pretty flaky on TV, like what they call "extreme birth" with dolphins or in remote lagoons, although in reality planned home birth with good midwifery care is as safe as hospital birth."

After viewing Elson's new documentary, "Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing", you realize she's absolutely right. It would be hilarious (and it sometimes is) if not for the absurd reality that we're talking about society's visual storytelling of the single most connecting link between human beings in the history of all that is and ever was: birth. Why are we presenting childbirth in ways that repel, scare and misrepresent women (and our someday partners) and our birth experiences? By ceding the representation of childbirth to the "oh, it's just television" mode of thinking we surrender some of the wisdom of our own bodies, the knowledge about birth we can pass onto other women, the wonder of the beauty and the remembrance of the pain in a way, as well. Elson is determined to take it back.

It is a growing problem. Elson reminds us in the video "two-thirds of pregnant women watch reality television shows on childbirth but only one-quarter of these women actually attend childbirth education classes." What kind of "education" about birth are women getting? First off, babies can be beamed out, as one was from Deanna Troi on "Star Trek: Next Generation." Or, cesarean sections are becoming "the norm" as vaginal birth is being presented as 'the other' option on reality television shows about pregnancy and birth (view her video to learn more). And, finally, should you find yourself pregnant, on a beach sunbathing? Elson tells me that one of the weirdest television scenes about birth she's witnessed was from the old TV show, Baywatch, where one of the characters gives birth without taking off her one-piece bathing suit.

I spoke with Vicki Elson about her video documentary: the "panicky fathers" and "mothers screaming for drugs" on one end of the media-representation spectrum. And the "orgasmic" and "unassisted" births on the other. Because Elson has been working with women and their partners for many years, her answers to my questions and her perspective seem wonderfully balanced, rooted in a crystal clear concern for what is best for women, preparing women to have the healthiest birth experience they are able.

You've been educating pregnant women for 25 years! What made you originally decide to get into this line of work and what was the impetus for making this documentary?

VE: When I had my first baby, I was young and clueless and I considered myself a wimp. It was the hardest work I ever did, but it was a life-changing joy. Afterward I felt like I could do anything - which was great, because what I had to do next was raise a baby. I think it really set the stage for my daughter's entire life - and mine. There were certain elements that contributed to having such a positive experience - my care providers, childbirth classes, and support team especially. I wanted to share that with other families, and all these years later, teaching classes and watching new parents get born is still fun!

The impetus for the film was this: I was doing a workshop for nurse-midwives at a local hospital when a particularly ghastly and unrealistic (and Emmy-winning) episode of "E.R." came out. The midwives said their phones were ringing off the hooks because moms were scared that they could die like the lady on TV. Meanwhile, Murphy Brown was America's liberated TV mom who could anchor the news and stand up to Dan Quayle. But in labor, she was wilted and powerless, except when she was strangling men by their neckties. I wanted my kids and their friends to grow up with realistic, nourishing imagery about the power of their bodies to do normal things like have babies. I was working with midwives Rahima Baldwin Dancy and Catherine Stone on a workshop called "Empowering Women in the Childbearing Year," and we started collecting clips to show childbirth educators what they were up against from the culture. It's still a struggle to compete with compelling but unrealistic imagery that sticks in people's minds. I expanded on that project to write my master's thesis 10 years ago, and when the kids grew up I finally got around to updating the project and putting it on DVD so it's more useful and accessible.

What's the film like?

VE: It's 100 birth scenes -- TV and movie comedies, dramas, real births -- plus narration. Birth films tend to be very romantic or absolutely terrifying. I wanted to juxtapose real and fake births and let people make up their own minds, and I wanted to make it funny, because the subject can be so intense. And I have to say that it is pretty entertaining. It can be really fun to examine cultural hopes and fears in a new way, and a lot of the clips are hilarious.

Do the pregnant women in your classes (and/or partners) ever come in to class with visions about childbirth that they got from the media, that are just so bizarre or unrealistic that is noteworthy for you?

VE: I wish I had some hilarious anecdote to tell you - but really what's striking is that women who are otherwise smart and capable come to class feeling very scared of a normal physiological process. It's getting worse over time, too, as people are exposed to more and more media, and more people are watching birth "reality" shows than coming to childbirth classes. The reality shows often take footage of a nice normal birth and then re-contextualize it with a terrifying voiceover: "The most DANGEROUS journey of the baby's life...the four-inch trip...DOWN...the birth...canal."

What are the usual stories in TV and movie birth scenes?

VE: The mom is married, white, heterosexual, upper middle class, slender, and about 30. Labor starts and she needs to be rushed to the hospital - this started with Lucille Ball. She hits a traffic jam or a flood or some other drama on the way. The doctor is rude or maybe incompetent. She was planning a natural birth but then she dramatically requests drugs.

What about fathers and partners?

VE: They're panicking and driving badly or getting waylaid on the way to the hospital. Or, they're being beaten up or sworn at by the mom. But I think the same thing works for moms and for their partners, whether their partners are male or female: counteract the unrealistic imagery with realistic imagery and solid information. Birth does have some risks, it is painful, it is messy and noisy and joyful and sweaty. But it's not the embarrassment or the catastrophe it looks like on TV - it's just the hard work that we mammals do. Partners can make a world of difference with nothing more fancy than love and backrubs and words of encouragement.

There is a film "Being Dad" that's been getting good reviews. I think it's important for moms to know what it's like for dads as well as vice versa, and this film may help. I am also a big fan of women's groups and men's groups. My partner and I have been in our respective groups for many years, and there is a lot to be said for the candor and intimacy of gender-specific socializing. Such groups are also a great safety net when one member or another hits a rough patch in life.

One line really struck me in the video. When a woman says, "Some of my friends feel sorry for me that I had a c-section. I had a healthy baby and that's what matters." How do we present more realistic experiences of women who have c-sections, while simultaneously addressing how important it is not to treat c-sections as just "another way to give birth" - that it is major surgery?

VE: I tried to make the film inclusive of all mothers. It is important to acknowledge that cesarean birth is indeed a birth: it is every bit as meaningful, and it can be every bit as joyful as birth the old-fashioned way. There are two other things we should acknowledge simultaneously, though. One is that outcomes don't improve significantly when the cesarean rate is over 5 or 10 percent, and now it's 32 percent in the U.S. Therefore the majority of cesareans are medically unnecessary, with attendant risks and costs. The other thing to keep in mind is that cesarean birth can be harder to recover from physically and emotionally, and moms will need extra support. A woman healing from a cesarean may need to work on acceptance, and people should be absolutely respectful. She may experience conflicting feelings from losing her ideal birth and gaining a healthy baby. She may also wish to investigate whether her surgery was medically necessary, or to educate other mothers about making informed decisions, but such activism must come from her.

In the video, one woman asks: "Are these my only choices? An unnecessary cesarean or an orgasm in a hot tub?" I think, for women who are set on having a natural childbirth, sometimes the pressure to think they have to have the most wondrous, orgasmic birth is another level of perfectionism for women. Do you think more realistic images of birth in the mainstream media can help women on this end of the spectrum as well?

VE: Absolutely. Imagery can be overly romanticized OR overly medicalized. From the beginning, childbirth education has run the risk of giving the impression that there's a "right" way to give birth. I love the orgasmic birth films because it's great to know that birth is not necessarily a medical event that's all about pain - birth is, in fact, part of the continuum of a couple's love life. (Hey, if I'd known orgasmic birth was a possibility, I might have had more kids!) But just because a few women have such pleasure doesn't mean the rest of us should compare ourselves to them. No two women give birth alike, and even the same woman will have different experiences with each baby. Yes, the media should be more realistic, AND women need to take responsibility for filtering what they take in. Each of us needs to own and honor our own unique experience. And our friends and care providers should support that.

Are you promoting home birth or natural birth?

VE: I tried to make a film that doesn't propagandize any particular way of giving birth, because everybody's different and there can always be surprises no matter what kind of birth you've planned. The film has a wide variety of births: real, imaginary, fast, slow, simple, complicated, natural, surgical, orgasmic...

We see virtually no images of childbirth doulas in mass media. Do you show your childbirth students images of doulas at work with their clients?

VE: I can think of only one or two doulas (non-medical labor support providers) who appear in my film, but I agree that it's an extremely important topic that should be emphasized wherever possible. I'm a doula myself and I loved having doulas at my children's births. Doulas help moms and partners and siblings through labor, and often provide more continuity than doctors, midwives, or nurses can offer. The reassuring presence of a doula - even one who doesn't speak the same language! - has been shown to shorten labor, decrease intervention rates, and improve maternal-infant bonding. There is a related profession called post-partum doula. These fabulous people cook and clean and massage and support breastfeeding in the early weeks.

It seems obvious why the mass media portrays birth in the way it does - it's traditionally, like most cultural institutions in this country, been a male-dominated institution, on the whole. So, how do we go about changing these portrayals?

VE: I think that it's not just a problem of patriarchy - it's a problem of profit. Hollywood is under the impression that what sells is danger, speed, indignity. To remedy this, we have to start with media literacy - making ourselves less vulnerable to media imagery. If we have to wait for Hollywood, we might wait a long time. I'm giving it a try, though - I'm starting up an Authentic Birth Clearinghouse (www.authenticbirthclearinghouse.com will launch soon). It will offer assistance to mass media writers, producers, actors, and directors. There will be guidelines, connections with expert advisors, links to websites that offer realistic birth imagery, and workshops in Los Angeles, New York, and elsewhere.

Who is this documentary for?

VE: It's great for childbirth classes, high school health classes, and college courses in media studies, medical anthropology, or women's studies. It's a good film to screen as a fundraiser for childbirth or media literacy organizations. It's a good resource for libraries. And it's an offbeat gift (or activity) for baby showers!

You can view the feel good trailer below but one word of warning to all: have a box of tissues nearby because birth, when it's shown in all its glory, is a beauty to behold:

For more information on the video or to order a copy, visit Birth-Media.com.

Allison Gilbert: Parentless Parents: Using The Holidays To Keep The Memory Of Your Parents Alive -- Part 2

2009-12-23T15:10:00Z

Last week, I wrote about one of the best ways to keep the memory of your parents alive during the holidays. It's simple and doesn't cost a penny. All you have to do is make a conscious decision to slow down long enough -- not so easy this time of year, I admit -- to simply talk with your children about the grandparents they no longer have in their lives. Conversations are invaluable and have the additional advantage of being super easy. They can happen anywhere -- in the car or at the mall.

But there are other ways to accomplish the same goal. In the Parentless Parents survey, which is part of the research I am conducting for my forthcoming book, Parentless Parents: How the Deaths of Our Mothers and Fathers Impact the Way We Parent Our Own Children, respondents have impressed me with some of the creative strategies they use. Here's a sampling:

"My mother sewed and I make ornaments out of the old wooden spools of thread that were left over in her sewing basket."

"My dad was a HUGE Big Band fan and I will play 'his' music in the house."

"I have a couple of recipes I prepare that were my mother's - everyone knows they were her recipes - even though they never knew my mother."

"We give gifts to the kids and ask them to consider it from one of their grandparents because we know it's something they would have bought them."

And there's an added benefit to all this holiday memory sharing. If you're honest with your children about your feelings of loss, they may just surprise you with the most meaningful gift you'll likely receive - your very own child not just thinking about the presents she wants, but rather the kind of support she can give. One mom writes in the survey about the first Christmas she ever spent without her mom: "My oldest daughter bought me a Whitman's sampler, which my mother had given me every year for as long as I could remember. We laughed and joked and remembered special times with her. We were able to make new memories without forgetting the past."

Christmas is here. It's no longer "around the corner." Now is the time. How will you use the next few days -- the next few hours -- to keep the memory of your parents alive? Let me know in the comment section below. You can also join the discussion by taking the Parentless Parents survey. I'll use your anonymous responses in my book.

***

Allison Gilbert is currently writing her third non-fiction book, Parentless Parents: How the Deaths of Our Mothers and Fathers Impact the Way We Parent Our Own Children. If you are a parent who has lost both your parents, you can help with her research by taking the Parentless Parents online survey. You can also join the "Parentless Parents" community on Facebook.

Parentless Parents will be published by Hyperion and is a follow-up to her critically acclaimed book, Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents. Parentless Parents will explore how the way we parent is shaped by the loss of our own mothers and fathers; how marriages are impacted when one spouse is parentless and the other is not; and offer strategies for keeping the memory of our parents alive for our children.

In Always Too Soon, Ms. Gilbert (a producer at CNN in New York and mother of two children) interviewed celebrities and others about losing their parents. She spoke with, among others, Rosanne Cash, Geraldine Ferraro, Ice-T, Yogi Berra, Mariel Hemingway, and New York Times best-selling authors, Hope Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich. Always Too Soon sparked the formation of the Parentless Parents organization, a national network of support groups for mothers and fathers who have lost their own parents. You can find out more about Ms. Gilbert by visiting her website at www.allisongilbert.com.

Carol Smaldino: Parenting: Grazing With Our Kids, Attachment Not Allowed

2009-12-23T14:36:00Z

This post is a rebuttal to TIME magazine's recent cover story about helicopter parents vs. free-range kids.

There is a fine line between the satire which liberates and refreshes, and that which smugly injures, with condescension, the very people it aims to awaken. Last week's TIME magazine cover story on parenting was obviously designed to provoke, fire up, amuse, relax and dismay those in and out of the world of parents in action.

Yes, we all know parents who are so hyper-critical or enamored of their children can be annoying to the point of suffocation. This is not, however, the only flavor of intense involvement with our children, nor is deep parental attachment always negative.

While for some an article such as the one authored by Nancy Gibbs can seem like the perfect irreverent anti-dote to hyper-parenting, such glibness -- whether issued from a qualified expert or a blogger -- doesn't mean they know better. The danger exists that many parents, lost in the whirlwind of demands and pressures, will cling to anything that is deemed the "cooler" way according to the fashion of the moment. The truth is that everyone is watching us (now more than ever), and pat advice is a poor substitute for a helping hand when our children are melting down. The fact is, this parenting thing is messy, as is any close relationship which pushes our buttons and brings out the worst as well as the best.

When we care enough become attuned to ourselves as parents and to our children, the most inconvenient truths come out in unexpected (and usually dreaded) leaking exposures of rage or sadness or fear. And if we allow the pendulum to swing too far to so-called "slow parenting," instead of knowing and integrating our emotions better, we will eventually only add to the already present epidemic of cultural distraction and detachment from each other.

While Gibbs writes about the over-pressured and pressuring parents "helicoptering" over their kids' every move, she ignores the need adults and children have for deep levels of attunement. Sensitivity to a child's vulnerability at crucial phases is in fact not hovering, it is attunement: the very substance of attachment and the capacity for intimacy. Optimally, resolving frictions within a family atmosphere is as good a practice as any of conflict resolution in the larger world.

The focus of the TIME feature is new parenting movements, including the slow parenting movement and conceptualizing children as "free range". Well, children are not chickens, and their needs are not chicken feed. Lax parenting isn't really new, and like the more over-protective parenting, it comes from the same place of self-absorption and lack of flexibility. The fact is that there are actually phases of child development and changing moods, in addition to a need for parental involvement.

Just telling a parent to "relax" as the "free-range" movement suggest is as off-putting as it is pat. Relaxation can't be mandated, and if it is, we will have an increase in acting "as if" relaxed while still under the spell of worry about being judged as too stiff. When any script, no matter how humorous, is superimposed on already existing tension, the recipient of such a script merely hides the tension in deeper places.

Helping parents relax is a wonderful idea, but it is not synonymous with minimizing the importance in their children's growth. Sure, each individual child might not be the end all be all, but it is not wrong for a parent to talk to a teacher about her own child's needs. Such intervention is not always the product of hovering or over-control. Of course there are many obnoxiously bossy and self-absorbed parents, but pat advice born out of ridicule will not only fail to change them, but it will cause them to become further entrenched in their behavior.

As a family therapist, I find it interesting that while parents are being prodded to slow down and let their kids graze, most of us still belong to the religious systems based on threats and judgments and shunning. We have institutionalized an often desperate need to belong and to measure up. This leaves the parent who doesn't abide by the guru of the moment lost in dysfunction. Oh, how we all chide anyone who doesn't go along with our diets or our binges, and how we chide those who don't follow our parenting mantras.

How do we tell parents to settle down and breathe while many of our kids are not mentally or physically safe in school? Children are cutting themselves and writing death threats and Columbine journals, and still nothing changes. We have ghettos of physical poverty, drugs and violence, where a child cannot walk to school without fear of a stray bullet. How does slow parenting fit in this context? If we, the parents, keep being as slow as we are in this arena, our kids will continue to move quickly into alienation, boredom, and all the high tech addictions we have designed for them.

I stand my ground on professional, personal and civic levels. My fear is that Gibbs' good fun is ultimately careless regarding the damage being done to our children on all levels, by violence, by lack of intimacy with their parents as well as with anyone else.

My warning would be: Beware the revolution that defines itself as new without looking inward. There is much to be learned from attunement--no helicopters involved--to ourselves and our children who often have so much to teach us when we take the time to listen.

Tom Matlack: Santa Interventions: Helping Parents Save The Magic

2009-12-23T12:28:00Z

Christmas is upon us, and for many Santa's bag full of surprises includes an assortment of personal dilemmas all having to do with ... Santa. We long for the idyllic experience that the song promises -- "tiny tots with their eyes all aglow," but we fall short of achieving the Hallmark card image.

My friend Arita Trahan, author of The Santa Story Revisited: How to Give Your Children a Santa They Will Never Outgrow, is on a mission to revolutionize the way Santa is celebrated. She is offering Santa interventions for parents via free daily teleconferences on her website at www.TheSantaStory.com to heal the wounds of Santas past and present and restore the magic.

Arita says, "I wrote The Santa Story Revisited to give parents easy ways to segue from the standard 'believing in' version of Santa into a story that anyone can tell in their own way and a game that everyone can play. By making this shift, Santa is even more magical for the kids -- and the parents are no longer involved with any type of deception. It works for kids of all ages, from tots just being introduced to Santa, to children who have known old Santa for a number of years."

Arita continued, "Because young children live in an imaginal realm through about seven years of age, they move fluidly between fact and fantasy. Their dolls are sometimes real babies and sometimes just dolls. Every character in a book, every Disney hero, is real to them. We don't have to convince them of anything for them to enjoy these stories in this way; it's their default into making life magical and joyful. In the same way, Santa can be presented and explained as a story that's as genuinely magical as we intended him to be when we said he was a real person."

It's my experience that most parents are unsure as to how and when to tell their children the truth. It can be awkward. What initially felt like a magical tale and a romp in innocence suddenly doesn't sound so sweet. As a father, Arita's mission speaks to me. She understands the parent's position and gives them guidelines and tips to segue to the new Santa in graceful and generous terms.

Since the publication of her book, Arita has been sought out as the Santa intervention expert, leading her to offer the free teleconferences. Arita says that, other than psychologists who pick up the pieces -- usually years afterwards, no one gives parents advice on how to address the train wreck that frequently unfolds when the jolly guy is outed.

She told me of one bewildered mother who approached her for a Santa intervention the other day. The story was all too common. The woman was on the verge of tears because her beloved son had "found out" and was now accusing her of lying. He yelled it at her and she didn't know how to respond. Arita pointed her to the sample scripts and advice in her book and explained that discussing the issue with her son now was imperative in order to restore trust.

Arita believes the Santa stories are an archetypical aspect of the parent/child relationship. She says, "Sometimes parents don't realize how much the Santa deception has impacted their children's trust in them. That's why it's so important to end the deception and deal with the issue as soon as possible. The process of telling the child a new Santa story can be a rite of passage to celebrate--even when it is messy. After all, a trusting relationship between parent and child is worth the effort to reestablish."

But Arita's interventions aren't just for those with young children. Since becoming a "Santa expert" and writing her book, she says she has counseled many adults who still experience the wounding of their youth, which revisits them annually, just like the ghost of Santas past. For these individuals, Arita also offers support so that, going forward, the impact of their personal history can be viewed in a positive way.

Arita will be giving advice on Santa interventions via free teleconferences through her website, www.TheSantaStory.com.

Arita Trahan is the author of The Santa Story Revisited: How to Give Your Children a Santa They Will Never Outgrow. The book is also available on Amazon and through other book retailers.

Arita also penned the lyrics for a song that promotes her message that it's more fun when kids join in and everyone plays Santa. The song is I'm Being Santa, with music by Mark Horwitz. A music video of the song, featuring the Agape International Children's Choir from Culver City, California can be seen on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbh45srDylc.

Susan Kim: Fairy Tales, Child Development, And Unconscious Learning

2009-12-21T14:25:00Z

I just read a review of what sounds like a fascinating new book by film historian David Thomson, called The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder. Thomson explores the far-reaching cinematic influence of this seminal film, a legacy that he argues lingers on today in the increasingly cool depiction of violence in movies and the growing disconnect between filmic images of gore and its actual emotional content. The famous, much-studied shower scene with its gouts of crimson (shot in black-and-white, no less) broke new ground in the way it aestheticized violence. Today, we routinely watch buckets of fake blood merrily exploding every which way in movies, on TV and the internet, all in the name of a quick adrenaline burst, a dark laugh, a gruesome visual. What's missing is the emotional, psychological and even cultural meaning of that vital red fluid - the fear, terror, even wonder.

This is odd, when you consider that according to the National Institute of Mental Health up to 18 percent of Americans, mostly women, suffer from phobias -- the most common being fear of blood. Maybe it's intrinsically hard-wired into our brains; after all, if one is watching blood spurt out of someone's torso, especially one's own, who wouldn't assume something has gone horribly wrong and start freaking out? And yet we know that blood is also a healthy part of an everyday, non-pathological body process, namely menstruation. As a result, most grown women can deal with their periods without the panic brought on by, say, the sight of arterial spray. But what about children? In the days before sex education and femcare marketing, how were clueless little girls taught that the sudden and unexpected appearance of blood wasn't a fearsome thing, something to shriek at and cower from in abject terror?

Enter Bruno Bettelheim, whose seminal 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, remains a must-read for anyone interested in childhood development and kids' literature. In it, he claims that classic Western fairy tales -- with their improbable heroes and heroines, cannibalistic villains, impossible tasks, talking animals and magical talismans -- are in fact the best tools to teach young children how to handle the basic, underlying fears, problems and questions in their lives. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way fairy tales deal with menarche, menstruation, and a girl's transition to sexual adulthood.

This doesn't mean it's overt; trust me, you'll be searching the Brothers Grimm until hell freezes over if you're looking for specific references to the endometrium, follicle-stimulating hormones, or Fallopian tubes. But even the most metaphor-challenged can't help but notice how many times the color red plays an important role in a fairy tale involving a young girl, or how often blood is a significant part of the plot: Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty ... even Cinderella and that weird little bird singing "there's blood in the shoe".

Fairy tales communicate strong, unconscious messages to children in terms they can grasp and even carry into adulthood. This is because these stories possess genuine resonance and dreamlike power, the kind you're just not going to find, say, on your average TV sitcom. As for sitcoms, I've found that literal references to menstruation in film and on television, while more common than you might think, are singularly underwhelming. Even when a woman's period isn't treated as the eye-rolling punchline to another sophomoric joke, the best-intentioned references tend to be bland and safe, with a distinct lack of resonance or importance attached to the process. Nothing I've seen as an adult even hints at the mystery and potential psychological power of menstruation the way fairy tales do... with the possible exception of one movie.

Carrie, the 1976 movie directed by Brian DePalma, written by Lawrence D. Cohen and based on the first novel by Stephen King, is one of the most whoppingly effective fairy tales ever made for adults. It's a Gothic horror story, a supernatural fable about menstruation, the taboos surrounding it, and the power it can unleash -- filtered through a Roman Catholic sensibility and juxtaposed against 70s American suburbia. To some, it's a cheesey camp-fest; to me, it's one of the best horror films ever made and, I bet, probably the only one about primary amenorrhea.

Don't get me wrong - I'm a big Hitchcock fan, and Psycho definitely makes it on my desert island list. Yet it's intriguing to think this classic film may have helped usher in a new era of stylized storytelling... in which the resonance has basically been bled out of blood.

Sheila Lirio Marcelo: Child Care: A Worker And A Mother

2009-12-21T13:53:00Z

Throughout most of my career, I've worked in environments with more men than women. This even started even back in business school. It's just part of the world I work in: startups and the venture capital space. According to the most recent data available (it's eight years old, but things haven't changed dramatically since then), only five percent of investments go to businesses owned by women. Another study shows an even lower number, reporting that just "2.3 percent of dollars among the investors surveyed went to women-owned firms." Often, the entrepreneurial world is dominated by the guys.

Today if I'm invited to participate in a conference on small business, entrepreneurs or online companies, I'm often the only woman on the panel. Initially this intimidated me. I remember struggling at the beginning of my career to have confidence in myself and my ideas while I sat in conference rooms as the only woman (and, often, minority) there. To get me through, I thought of my mother and how she--an entrepreneur herself--inspired me to be strong. These situations usually don't bother me anymore, but I still can't keep from observing these imbalances as I move forward in my career.

Most working women and mothers experience the same thing. Sue Shellenbarger of the Wall Street Journal recently covered a new study from the Academy of Management Journal. She reported "bosses still see women as more conflicted than men over work and family--regardless of their actual caregiving duties." Even though child care, senior care and work/life balance affect both parents in two-parent households, managers in the study subconsciously assumed the brunt of that burden fell to their female employees and affected their work output.

As a parent, I know my responsibility of being a good mom to Ryan and Adam does affect my work. How couldn't it? Recent studies show the average family experiences five "child care crises" each year that cause parents to miss work or change their schedules (parents of children with special needs experience twice as many "care crises," by the way.) But work responsibilities and the daily shuffle don't just affect me. They affect Ron, too. I've written before about parents dividing caregiving responsibilities. Having four hands when it comes to caring for our kids certainly makes things easier than only two.

Yet it looks like women still have to overcome a workplace perception that they're more distracted or occupied with family matters on a regular basis. Maybe that's just another obstacle we have to navigate in the corporate world. We working mothers have to make ourselves known as both "workers" and "mothers," demonstrating to our bosses and co-workers that it's possible to be both successfully. That's another thing my mother taught me. More than showing me how to be strong woman, she set an example of how to be a dedicated, determined worker in the workplace. And at home, she also showed me how to become the best mother I could be.

I've loved Sue's advice for women to confront the perceptions head-on by openly discussing their goals and challenges with their bosses, showing them desire to be both a worker and a mother. At my company, we've tried to address these issues by creating an open environment with ongoing dialogues that address not only work subjects, but work/life balance. We do this for everyone, regardless of gender or family background, too. I've found this openness not only helps everyone on the team manage expectations, but also encourages a culture where everyone cares about their teammates and helps eliminate any unwarranted perceptions.

While every company is different in the way it presents and processes feedback like this, I'd also encourage other working mothers (and fathers!) to be open about your jobs, family and work/life balance. Once you do, then it's up to you to get out there and exceed expectations--that's really the best way to blow through any potential obstacles or misconceptions.

Irene Zutell: Growing Up: Santa's Last Visit?

2009-12-21T13:43:05Z

From the moment she could talk, my daughter, Olivia, questioned everything.

When she was four, she angrily hurled her fairy tale book at the wall because Cinderella made no sense. Olivia explained that if everything returned to normal at midnight, then why is that glass slipper still around?

And for that matter, if stepmothers were so evil and sinister, then why did all their spells have gaping holes? Why could a simple kiss fix Snow White? Same for Sleeping Beauty. And why did Hansel and Gretel forgive their dad at the end? He was going to kill them!

I usually didn't have an answer to her questions because my answers would lead to more questions and more and more. Until exhausted,I would finally say, "It's a fairy tale. What do you expect!"

She would nod and roll her eyes as if that was the silliest thing she'd ever heard.

So why then, at ten, does she still believe in Santa?

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad she does. Ecstatic. But I don't get it. The girl who questions everything, doesn't question that sometime while she's asleep on December 24th, a man in a red suit slips down the chimney with presents.

I want her to believe as long as possible, but I keep waiting for the punchline. Could she be amusing me? Toying with me? Desperately fooling herself so she doesn't miss out?

I really thought Santa would have a short lifespan in Olivia's world.

When she was six, she asked why Santa had the same wrapping paper as mommy.
"Well, umm, I guess he borrowed it and wrapped the presents here."

When she was seven, she asked why the presents had labels from Fisher Price and Mattel.
"Ummm, well, I guess with the population explosion, there aren't enough elves to make handcrafted toys for all the kids."

At eight, she exclaimed, "wow, mommy, Santa's elves must shop for clothes at Target. These are the same brands they have there. And he has the same taste as you do!"

"How weird. I bet they have their very own Target in the North Pole."

She nodded and seemed satisfied with these answers, but I kept thinking, okay, this is it. This is the last year. Definitely.

But nine came and went without incident. And here she is ten--a girl who gets nearly perfect scores on standardized tests. A girl who reads Charles Dickens as if it were Beverly Cleary. A girl who writes stories as if channeling a sixty-year-old woman.

A girl who believes in Santa.

Except for a few late bloomers, she's alone in her belief. She came home just a few days ago to tell me this. She was nonplussed.

"Mom, none of the kids in my class believe in Santa. Anna told me it's really parents giving the kids gifts. Even her mom said so."

And I thought, this is it. This is the moment when another phase ends. Another little childhood death. My heart raced a bit. I felt flushed. I thought, if I can't even tell her about Santa, how will I ever get through the sex talk? I held my breath, thinking of how to break the news as gently as possible.

I was about to speak, but Olivia cut me off.

"Isn't that so stupid? They won't get anything from Santa with that attitude. No wonder Anna's mom has to buy her presents. Santa's not going to stop by that house ever again."

I scanned her face. I'm not naive. I know my daughter. Her look was guileless. There wasn't a hint of doubt in her convictions. But she looked hard at me, waiting for confirmation.

It all ended too early for me. When I was eight, Celia, my teenage babysitter, told my horrified six-year-old sister and me all about menstruation. That same year my neighbor found a book about sex under her mother's bed and showed it to us--pictures and all. A few months later, our beloved paper boy was killed in a car accident.

So after all this, a kid at school telling us there was no such thing as Santa seemed anticlimactic. We already knew about sex and death, so the nonexistence of Santa made perfect sense. It wasn't like, WOW! It was more like, DUH!

My daughter studied me hard. I paused for a moment. Do I tell her the truth like Anna's mom did? Surely, Olivia is just a few days, weeks, at the most months, away from figuring it out. Right? Is it wrong to continue the charade? Will she look foolish in class? Will kids make fun of her? Most importantly, will she resent me when she figures it out? And, on the plus side, if I admit that it's dad and mom, I can take her shopping for stuff she really wants. She can help me wrap her little sister's gifts.

But I want her to believe in Santa for as long as possible. Once Santa disappears, he takes so much with him. I want her to believe in magic and mystery and the possibility of everything because, well, isn't that what childhood is about? Why does it all have to make sense?

So let Anna's mom be a realist, a downer, a killer of innocence. I'm not ready. And if Olivia's the only teenager who leaves milk and cookies for Santa, so be it!

"You're right. Of course Santa won't be stopping by Anna's. Her parents probably buy her presents so she won't feel bad."

Olivia smiled. "That's what I thought. You're lucky that I still believe... I'm saving you a lot of money on presents."

She thought about this for a few seconds.
"But if you want, you can get me presents too."

April Daniels Hussar: Parenting Crisis: The Santa Claus Lie

2009-12-21T13:29:38Z

I don't remember ever believing in Santa Claus. My mother believed whole-heartedly until she was quite old -- maybe nine or 10 -- and, as she tells me, she was so utterly heartbroken and disillusioned when she found out the truth, that she wanted to spare me from the heartache. So, though I do have a photo of me on Santa's lap, I think I was too young at the time to really understand who he was supposed to be -- and by the time I was old enough, I knew who he wasn't.

Read Do You Believe in Magic?

My six-year-old daughter Isabella, on the other hand, is a believer. And this year, her letter to Santa breaks my heart. It's just a short list with a big note at the top that says, in her sweet, first-grader scrawl: "Dear Santa, What I really want this year is to go for a ride on your sleigh."

Ugh. Instant, wretched mommy-guilt. I immediately began trying to figure out how I could fake that. Of course, I can't. And it kills me because I know that no matter what we tell her (Oh honey, Santa can't do that, it's not fair to the other kids ...), she believes in her heart there is a slight possibility that he'll arrive on Christmas Eve to grant her wish, and whisk her off through the sky in his cozy sleigh, the stars twinkling merry Christmas songs and Rudolph beaming his red nose to guide them all the way to the fairyland at the North Pole.

Crap.

Earlier today, I asked my husband if he feels bad that we taught Isabella about Santa Claus. "Yes," he said immediately. "It's a lie." He's worried that when she does find out the truth, she won't ever believe in magic again. The real kind of magic -- which, the way I think he sees it, is the magic of possibility, of miracles, of all the beautiful, unexplainable things in life and beyond.

"So you wish we never told her about Santa?" I asked. "Yeah," he replied, "I wish we just taught her about The Spirit of Christmas."

Ah yes, the Spirit of Christmas -- a very real and true thing, even for non-religious people like us. And certainly a concept that we'll try to segue Isabella's notion of Santa Claus into, because of course Santa really does exist, in a way, if you think of him as a parable, as an embodiment of giving and generosity. It's just that the truth isn't as exciting if it doesn't come wrapped in a red coat and a long white beard, carried on a magical sleigh.

That's the bald-face lie part. And it's making me more and more uncomfortable as Isabella gets older that I'm telling her a lie when the rest of the time we teach her to be honest and true.

Plus, it's getting harder to lie without being caught out, and the more fibs I have to tell her, the more conflicted I feel. How can I look right in her sweet, trusting face and tell her a lie? And worst of all, what if -- horrible thought - it's really selfish to teach our kids that there's a Santa - what if it's really for our own vicarious enjoyment that we make these stories up?

I know that soon the discrepancies and inconsistencies (Santa has the same wrapping paper as us?!) -- not to mention the whispers of older kids at school -- will all add up to one unavoidable conclusion: Santa Isn't Real. And for that matter, neither is the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy (or -- at our house -- the Birthday Fairies). All this time it's been us, her regular old mom and dad, putting notes and money under her pillows, hiding beautiful Easter baskets in her closet (and trying to remember how many eggs got hidden throughout the house so we don't have any nasty surprises a month after Easter), and sneaking downstairs to stuff stockings and pile presents under the tree.

So. Is the inevitable disappointment not worth these years of magic? Do I wish I never told Isabella about Santa Claus?

In the end, I don't. I can't help but be glad she's experiencing this excitement and wonder. I know it's based on something that's not true, and I know that when she does find out, it'll be disappointing. But the thing is ... there is magic in the world. And there really is a Santa Claus -- in spirit. Every time someone makes a donation, or volunteers in a homeless shelter, or visits a nursing home ... that's the spirit of giving. And the nice, warm feeling we get when we give to someone else - whether it's a gift to our friend or a helping hand or a shoulder to cry on - that's the spirit of giving too. That's what I hope my daughter will carry with her throughout her life.

And, ultimately, there is magic in the way a parent loves a child, and wants to create a world of beauty and light for her. As that brilliant newspaperman wrote all that long time ago: Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

So one day Isabella will know that it was her daddy and me all along ... is that really such a bad thing?

This is cross-posted at BettyConfidential.com

Melanie Duppins: KIPP Houston High School: U.S. News And World Report's Gold Medal List As 16th In The Nation

2009-12-21T12:49:07Z

Last week, U.S. News and World Report announced the 100 Gold Medal high schools in the United States. KIPP Houston High School, a college-preparatory school in the heart of Houston, Texas, ranked 16th on this list. This accomplishment is a significant testament to the staff and leadership of KHHS - especially since the school was founded just six years ago. Last month, I saw for myself the magic of KIPP Houston high school and why it's experienced the success it has: strong school leaders, innovative and enterprising teachers, and agile program staff that step up to the plate to meet the needs of their teachers and schools.

Thanks to a grant DonorsChoose.org received from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, this November we challenged all KIPP high school teachers nationwide to submit requests for materials and resources that would move the needle in terms of preparing their students for college. KIPP Houston teachers immediately took action - 20 teachers at their school posted college readiness requests in just a few weeks. Together, these requests will net their school more than $12,000 in resources this year!

With these sorts of results, it's no surprise why a school like KIPP Houston made the top 100 high schools in the country. Congrats, KIPP Houston! We're glad to root you on and to continue to share your teachers' best project ideas with the citizens, corporations, and foundations who want to help them!

Tom Matlack: Men Of A Certain Age: The Divorced Dad Hotel

2009-12-21T12:28:00Z

Ray Romano's new show Men of A Certain Age hit a nerve this week when Ray's character, Joe, tries to find his footing in the week-to-week rental hotel where he is staying while going through a divorce despite the fact that his kids have to visit him there and the whole thing makes him so desperately unhappy that he relapses into the gambling habit that was at the core of his marital problems to begin with. I have been to that Divorced Dad's hotel. And I have had that feeling of wanting to throw up as a result.

I woke up on my brother's couch. The sun hurt my eyes. I heard the rumble of the Red Line trains nearby. I realized it was Sunday. Slowly the pain crept back. I had to go to work in the morning. I had no clothes. The ones I was wearing were stained with tears, snot and perspiration. I got up and looked for coffee. I found none. A cat wrapped its body around my leg looking for food. I had no idea what to do next. I picked up the phone and called what used to be my home.

As a boy my father often read to us about real life shipwrecks, the most famous of which involved Shackleton, the British explorer who set out to traverse Antarctica. He never landed, getting stuck in the ice pack with no choice but try to wait out the endless dark of winter aboard the aptly named Endurance. The silence on the other end of the line made makes me feel like Shackleton, futilely hoping beyond hope that I am not going to have to abandon ship with the only alternative to lug a life boat across miles of barren ice. On the line I could hear the angry creaks and thunderous cracks that were a sure sign that the massive oak hull would be swallowed whole if I didn't get out immediately, despite the slim odds at survival. I explained that I needed clothes. She said that she would be at church with the kids for a couple hours and I could get them while they were out.

I drove the hour and a half from my brother's house in Dorchester to my old house, noticing the warm sunshine and blue skies along the way. I exited the highway and drove through the center of Barrington. Only when I turned right, just past the elementary school at the end of our street, did my stomach begin to churn. I pulled onto the cul-de-sac and saw the house at the far corner. Kids played in the street. I waved weakly.

I hit the remote control to open the garage door and parked my Saab in its spot. I opened the door to the mud room and walked into the living room. It was strewn with Kerry's toys: bright colored blocks, orange plastic vehicles, and stuffed animals. Seamus's bouncy chair sat empty in front of a large television set. Just yesterday morning I had laid on this very floor, building block sky scrapers with Kerry while Seamus watched a video. Now it was all gone. "I will never do that again. I will never lie on that floor as their father," I said to myself. I struggled to remind myself that my babies were not dead, just at church.

I decided I needed to get in and out of the house as quickly as possible. "This is enemy territory now, move it jack-ass," I coached myself. I bounded up the stairs, into the master bedroom and our walk-in closet, grabbing two blue suits, an arm full of starched white shirts, a couple ties, underwear, socks and black lace up dress shoes. Enough work clothes to last indefinitely as soon as I could find a dry cleaner downtown. I threw them all in a garment bag, stopping in the bathroom to pick up my Dobb kit. I walked back downstairs, through the kitchen and then living room, trying unsuccessfully to ignore the kids' toys this time. I ran out to the car, tossing the bag in the back and hitting the garage door opener once more.

As I drove away, I couldn't help picturing Kerry and Seamus in my mind's eye and thinking that I was driving straight out of their lives.

***

I slept on my brother's couch for a second time. This time he only checked on me once during the night, a bit more confident that I wouldn't try to kill myself. I kept thinking that maybe this was all a dream. But the day's events had given me tangible evidence that I was not dreaming.

I arrived at work early, eager to see my co-workers who knew me outside the world which had been blown to pieces. Just sitting at my desk I breathed easily for the first time in two days. The company had been sold, and my job was going away, so even that was temporary. But none of that mattered.

"Hey JoAnn, how was your weekend?" I asked my secretary as she put her Styrofoam Dunkin Donuts coffee cup on her desk just outside my office.

"Caitlyn scored two goals in her soccer game on Saturday," she reported. "I'd a date with a Hill-Billy Saturday night. Same old crap. He had to make up an excuse to leave before dessert."

I spent the day focused on the other things that had not changed, walling off anything outside 75 Fountain Street: the proud old office building that housed the newspaper. The huge open space on the first floor where the presses were originally located had long since been converted to the news room with massive photos of breaking stories on the wall--hurricanes and assassinations. But the floor under my desk was still suspended on springs to insulate the executives from the vibration of the printing presses below. I was surrounded, cocooned, comforted by the knowledge that I had this physical protection from violent vibrations.

I picked up a copy of the paper, pulling out the classified section and stuffing it in my brief case. I couldn't bring myself to look at it right away. But I knew I had to soon. I couldn't drive an hour and a half to work, sleeping on Will's couch, forever.

***

The Regency Plaza was a large 1970s era apartment building in the Howard Johnson's architectural genre. It was three blocks down from my Providence Journal office, overlooking route 95 and the Italian section of town, Federal Hill. The Regency advertised fully furnished week-to-week rentals.

That Monday after getting thrown out of the house, I called to make an appointment for my lunch hour. When I walked into the rental office the manager asked what I am interested in. I awkwardly explained, "I'm not sure."

He nodded with a sympathetic smile. After a moment, he came from behind his desk. "It'll get better, buddy," he said softly as he motioned me out into the hallway.

On the way to the elevator he pointed out a pool and tiny weight room, saying they have various social events in the lounge a couple times a week for residents. It struck me as amazingly pathetic, but I tried to banish the thought, not being able to take smug prisoners of the mind quite the way I used to.

On the fifth floor, he showed me a furnished studio with plush beige carpet. I noted more than few stains. The furniture was plastic with Formica counter and table tops. I inspected the pots and pans, the kind you can buy at a discount department store for $99 a set. There was one large smudged window. The traffic hummed below. I smelled Chinese food, unsure if the odor was next door or embedded in the dirty drapes. The rental agent told me they could arrange a weekly cleaning service; the dry cleaner picked up on Thursdays. I stared at the bed, queen-sized and tucked in the darkest corner of the one open room. I imagined hiding there, curled up in a ball--a hibernating bear, unaware of the winter outside. I knew I had to take the apartment, but the thought depressed me so thoroughly I told the agent I'd have to think about it. I couldn't quite admit, on the spot, that my life had been reduced to this.

Car Seat Recall: Car Seat Models For Safety 1st, Cosco, Eddie Bauer, Disney Are Recalled

2009-12-19T03:45:55Z

WASHINGTON — A baby product manufacturer recalled on Friday about 447,000 of its infant car seat carriers, including some branded with Eddie Bauer and Disney logos, after dozens of reports of the carrier's handle coming loose.

There have been at least three injuries to babies, including bumps, bruises and a head injury. Dorel Juvenile Group Inc., of Columbus, Ind., received 77 reports of the child restraint handle fully or partially coming off the products.

Jeffrey Shaffer: We're Being Bad: Are Mom And Dad To Blame?

2009-12-18T17:08:46Z

The last half of 2009 deserves a special place in the history books and it wouldn't be inaccurate to title the chapter "Grownups Gone Wild."

Some of the glaring examples of the past few months include Congressman Joe Wilson calling President Obama a liar on national TV, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford hooking up with a soul mate in South America, and Richard Heene staging an elaborate aerial hoax (and for the record, I think his son should hereafter be referred to as The Not-Really-In-The-Balloon Boy).

The list of ignominious incidents, augmented recently by the antics of elite party-crashers Tareq and Michaele Salahi and golf legend-turned-Lothario Tiger Woods, has caused numerous media pundits to decry what appears to be a relentless erosion of civility and good citizenship from coast to coast.

You can find similar sentiments expressed in coverage of less sensational topics such as teachers being stressed by student misconduct, sideline rudeness at sporting events, and the proliferation of violent video games.

As I read and reflect on the wide range of opinions about these problems, I've noticed a common thread in many of the storylines. When it comes to assigning blame for our collective decline in courtesy, integrity, and good judgement, two popular culprits are the mommies and daddies of America.

I won't argue with anyone who says bad parenting produces plenty of nasty consequences across the cultural landscape. I also agree that lots of kids are growing up with a distorted sense of entitlement and lousy social skills.

But it's simplistic to think substandard child rearing is a major cause of our national character flaws. Plenty of other factors are playing starring roles in this drama. Scandal-oriented journalism is now mainstream. In the broadcasting industry the concept of "restricted material" is nearly obsolete. Every day, American kids (and grownups) are bombarded with media messages that celebrate rudeness and rule breaking for their high entertainment value.

And at the risk of sounding like a total cranky geezer, I have to emphasize that complaints about parental incompetence don't resonate with me because I've been hearing them all my life.

"Bringing up baby" became a hot-button issue during World War II and each passing decade produces a new set of bogeymen who are allegedly damaging the mental and emotional health of our country's young people. Social commentators hammered parents in the 1950s with stern warnings about the insidious effects of comic books and rock music.

In the 1960s a new threat was perceived: rising divorce rates and growing numbers of single-parent households. Law enforcement officials warned that lack of adult supervision left kids with ample opportunities to experiment with drugs and alcohol. Rock music turned psychedelic.

During the '70s conventional parenting wisdom swung heavily in favor of boosting self-esteem and helping every child excel in the classroom. More and more parents began to see themselves as advocates for their kids. Some commentators began to wonder if "advocate" was just code for "I'm going to make sure my kids are always first in line for anything that might help them succeed and nobody better get in our way."

In the '80s the mantra of many schools and community organizations was "We're all winners." Hosting a birthday party meant providing goody bags for each guest. Soccer, softball and other youth teams handed out trophies to all players. The accumulation of commemorative hardware was impressive.

As a new millennium arrived, the push to maximize opportunities for achievement was having the unpleasant side effect of driving up anxiety levels in households all over the country. The January 29, 2001 cover of Newsweek showed a smiling boy, two haggard adults behind him, and this headline: The Parent Trap--Is Juggling Your Kids' Sports, Music, Etc. Burning You Out?

Now, almost ten stress-filled years later, parenting is often viewed as a relentless, grinding ordeal. Recently, my local paper ran a brief excerpt from a blog entry. The author had decided to quit a paid job in favor of staying home with two young children, and summed up her feelings about the task with this prediction: "I fully expected it to be intense work--isolating, emotionally draining, thankless..."

You might assume such attitudes would create a willingness to consider suggestions for improvement and you'd be wrong. In spite of the widespread perception that parenting is a long, hard slog, hardly anybody seems willing to admit their kids aren't doing just fine.

The quickest way to get your face ripped in half these days is to admonish a child for misbehaving in front of his or her parents. Not very long ago a school principal told me it wasn't a normal year "unless I have at least two lawsuits pending against me." She wasn't kidding.

I think of parenting as the ultimate free-market system. There are very few regulations and almost no prohibitions on who can participate. Like the weather, it's easy to complain about but trying to impose some kind of large-scale management plan isn't a realistic option.

How the system affects our individual development is hard to analyze and always will be. I know families that have multiple children, and all the kids have completely different personalities. There can be cheerful geniuses and sullen jerks sitting around the same dinner table. Why is that?

On the rare occasions when prospective parents ask me for advice all I can do is offer a few anecdotes in the form of "Here's what happened in our situation and some of it might be useful to you." But there's no template for parenting that guarantees great results. Every family brings a different set of values, habits, and personality traits into the process.

To anyone who is about to become a parent for the first time, I do have one simple request: please, PLEASE teach your kids to embrace the notion of "don't touch other people's stuff without asking permission first." If more Americans could grasp that concept early on and maintain it throughout their adult lives, I think daily life in the USA would be a teeny bit better.

But that's not a demand. I'm not trying to pump unjustified expectations into this complex and stressful process. And rest assured that if I ever catch your kids in a supermarket opening the bulk food bins and running their hands through the granola (which I have witnessed several times), I won't yell at them to stop or make any other attempt to correct their improper conduct.

Not unless my attorney is standing right behind me.

Lisa Firestone: What Is Really Behind the Current "Over-Parenting" Syndrome?

2009-12-18T15:38:23Z

Recently several best-selling books as well as a number of child development experts have focused their attention on the growing trend of "helicopter parenting" and have described its negative effects on children and adolescents. These writers point out how parents' tendencies to hover and overprotect their kids are destroying children's initiative and making them feel incompetent and inadequate. The media is being blamed for this trend because it constantly bombards us with reminders of the calamities that could befall our children if left unsupervised for even a moment.

The point made by these writers is valid and resonates with many parents. It does seem that in trying to help our children avoid potential danger, we are over-scheduling their lives and depriving them of the kinds of experiences that we enjoyed when we were young. However, there are other powerful unconscious forces operating that are driving parents to restrict their children's freedom of movement, ostensibly out of concern for their safety. Understanding these factors could be helpful.

In our work at the Glendon Association, a nonprofit psychological organization that provides parent education programs, we have come to recognize that many well-meaning parents overprotect their children, see them as less competent than they really are, and overstep their boundaries because they (the parents) feel connected to them through a process Dr. Robert Firestone calls the fantasy bond. In this imagined connection with their children, parents partly relieve their own fears of aloneness, separation, and death - the ultimate separation. In their minds, they feel merged with their children, while in reality, they may not be fully present in their interactions with them. These parents cherish the feeling of being needed by their kids, but actually they are not relating to them as unique, separate individuals.

The origins of the fantasy bond can be traced to infancy or early childhood. It arises to cope with interpersonal pain and separation anxiety and this imagined connection is reinforced when children learn about death. Even before they discover death, children use this fantasy of being merged with mother, along with primitive self-soothing behaviors, to partly relieve their pain and to avoid the possibility of being overwhelmed by the intensity of their reactions to separation experiences and other disturbing events.

The fantasy bond serves as a survival mechanism during childhood, but paradoxically becomes a barrier to one's personal development as an adult. Later, as people mature, marry and have children of their own, they develop fantasy bonds with their children to varying degrees, and the cycle is continued into the next generation.

Parents who have formed a fantasy bond with their children also believe that children "belong" to their biological parents in the proprietary sense of the word. The imagined union with their child, in conjunction with this feeling of ownership, provides mothers and fathers with a false sense of safety, security, certainty and permanence. The Catch-22 is that in order to sustain this illusion of fusion in our everyday lives, we need to keep our children close by, dependent on us, and guilty about pursuing separate and independent lives of their own. On a conscious level and in the interests of being good and proper parents, we warn them about the world, envelop them in a cocoon of safety, and shape them to conform to our vision of what they should be as adults.

The fear of death figures prominently in this scenario of family life. In their book Beyond Death Anxiety, Dr. Robert Firestone and Joyce Catlett explain how many parents envision family continuity as a form of symbolic immortality -- a kind of living on through their sons and daughters and their grandchildren in an endless chain of biological attachment. In one sense, our children do represent a symbolic victory over death by perpetuating our identity into the future. This notion is often referred to as gene survival. By transmitting our beliefs, attitudes, vocational skills, and wisdom to our offspring, we establish a sense of connection to the future.

Parents, again unconsciously, need to ensure that their children will perpetuate their (the parents') specific way of life. They feel compelled to shape the child in their own image and to stamp in their own beliefs and ways of coping with the world. Clearly, this compulsion can lead to child-rearing practices that do not allow children to fulfill their own destiny or develop their own unique personalities. It turns out that despite their best intentions, many parents are interfering with their child's developing into a competent adult capable of fulfilling his or her own goals in life.

In order to keep feelings of death anxiety at bay, parents must shape their children into the right kind of legacy. Our children can relieve our fears of death only if they adopt our political views, customs and beliefs. If they are too different from us, our anxieties about death and dying are intensified. For example, children who choose not to carry on the family business or who embrace a different political or sexual orientation not only erase the possibility of immortality for their parents, they also threaten the validity of their parents' worldviews and beliefs, which have functioned as cultural and individual solutions to the death problem

The media does tend to inundate us with warnings about an increasingly dangerous world, however, it cannot be blamed for instigating helicopter parenting. The evening news and violent films act only as triggers for deep-seated fears that most of us try not to think about or suppress altogether. Yet these suppressed anxieties are strongly influencing how we relate to our children.

If as parents, we were to genuinely relate to our children, if we did not connect to them in our imaginations, but rather related to them as separate individuals, we would have to feel how precious they are to us and how precious we are to them. This real feeling interaction disrupts the fantasized connection with our children and increases our death anxiety. But when we do the opposite, when we hover over our children, although we are physically present, we are cut off from feeling their true vulnerability and love. Unfortunately, to protect ourselves from experiencing poignant feelings and fears of future loss, we become somewhat removed and can be emotionally distant from our children.

One solution to the problem of "helicopter parenting" is to educate parents about these tendencies, which are present in everyone. The website PsychAlive.org provides opportunities for parents to learn about themselves and their relationship with their children. As human beings, we all face a common fate. So it is understandable that we would try to protect ourselves, and our children, against the anxiety, dread, and sadness that surround an awareness of the inevitability of death.

Part of the answer also lies in acknowledging death as a reality instead of resorting to illusions of connection to our children. By becoming more vulnerable to our feelings of sadness about future losses, we can meet the challenge and embrace life more fully. We can recognize why we have been compelled to force our children into a certain mold so as to ensure a kind of sameness with us. Based on this new awareness, we can then make a concerted effort to not create carbon copies of ourselves, but instead allow our children to freely develop their own interests, goals, and priorities in life.

For more information and resources, click on the "Alive to Parenting" section on www.psychalive.org.

Andrew Shapter: The Tao Of Mister Rogers

2009-12-17T18:05:09Z

When I was just six years old, I came home from school alone while my parents were away working long hours. Every afternoon, like so many children still do, I turned on the TV and got lost for three hours a day. It was my virtual babysitter. I watched re-runs of sitcom classics like Good Times and Three's Company, although hardly shows that a 6 year-old kid could relate to.

But within those few hours of television, I also watched a kind man from Pittsburgh--a guy named Fred McFeely Rogers. This man taught me some core values that are still with me today. Ever heard of him? Maybe you know him better as "Mister Rogers" from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.

To some, he was just a kid's show host whose pure innocence was easily parodied by comedians such as Eddie Murphy and Robin Williams. But for millions of young Americans like me, he was literally a daily mentor. Not only that, he was a friend.

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood ran weekdays on PBS from 1968 - 2001 to an estimated 28 million viewers a day. But Fred Rogers was not only a television mentor, he was also a minister, an accomplished musician, songwriter and a teacher who earned more than 40 honorary degrees.

In an interview conducted by CNN a few years before his death, Rogers stated, "I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there was some way of using this fabulous instrument to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen." And on he went for over 33 years, inspiring young minds from Harlem to Fort Worth.

Look up the definition of the word "mentor" and you'll find a very simple definition:

"A wise and trusted counselor or teacher."

Now more than ever, parents are working long hours just to make ends meet, and children are paying the price. Growing up in a tough economic climate can be a great character builder, but it also makes it harder for kids to get the guidance they need. Children are in desperate need of wise mentors.

According to the National Institute on Media and the Family, television is still a strong focal point when it comes to children's media entertainment. The Institute reports that up to 99% of American families have TV sets, but that only 1 in 8 of children's educational television programs meet high quality standards. At the same time, 60% of kids report that their parents do not know what they are watching on television.

Here are just a few examples of the wisdom of Mister Rogers, and what he could teach a new generation of children:

Self-esteem: "If only you could sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person."

Life's choices: "You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are."

Achievment: "It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff."

Parenting: "When we treat children's play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that's to be found in the creative spirit. It's the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives."

Responsibility: "We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say 'It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.' Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes"

Mentoring: "Anything that's human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone."

Imperfection: "Some days, doing the best we can do may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect on any front, and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else. "

Peace: "What really matters is whether the alphabet is used for the declaration of war or for the description of a sunrise."

Love and Trust: "Love and trust, in the space between what's said and what's heard in our life, can make all the difference in the world."

Over the 33 years of his broadcast, there have been so many children in need of mentors who had no one but Mister Rogers to turn to. Maybe (chances are) you also grew up watching Mister Rogers. Sadly, since his death, there have been fewer and fewer PBS affiliates airing the show. But there is hope: If your local PBS affiliate is no longer airing Mister Rogers Neighborhood, I encourage you to let them know how you feel about their decision to remove the show from their syndicated weekday lineup.

In telling PBS how important you feel the Neighborhood program is, you might want to relay a personal story of how Mister Rogers touched your life, or the life of a child you know. You can send an email to PBS Headquarters at the following address:

Linda Simensky, Senior Director, Children's Programming
Public Broadcasting Service
2100 Crystal Drive
Arlington, VA 22202

You can also contact PBS via their website PBS Feedback Or you can contact your local PBS member station here PBS | Station Finder.

In the event that your PBS station has continued to make the Neighborhood program available each weekday, you may want to consider sending an expression of gratitude, and making a monetary contribution. It's important to remember that public television is substantially underfunded, and that your local station needs your support. Join the Save Mister Rogers organization on facebook and join their efforts to bring one of America's greatest mentors back to television!

Allison Gilbert: Parentless Parents: Using The Holidays To Keep The Memory Of Your Parents Alive -- Part 1

2009-12-16T16:40:42Z

This is the 13th year I'm not celebrating the holidays with my mom. The 8th year without my dad. And because both of my parents have passed away, and because I am now a mom myself, I take on responsibilities in December that other parents may not; I am my children's primary teller of family history; the go-to explainer of why we cook certain foods; the main person they ask why we follow specific traditions. My parents simply can't share the burden or the stories. Without my parents -- Jake and Lexi's grandparents -- it's up to me to make up for the shortfall.

That's why it's surprising that less than half of all mothers and fathers who have taken the Parentless Parents survey so far say they use the holidays to talk about their parents who have died. Why so few? The holidays are the perfect time to keep the memory of your parents alive for your children. After all, you have their full attention. They're home, looking to be entertained, and they're not distracted by homework, play dates, or after school activities.

Of the 45 percent of parentless parents who say they use the holidays to talk about their parents, many say they do so to help their children understand why they perform certain rituals or follow particular traditions. In the Parentless Parents survey, which is part of the research I am conducting for my forthcoming book, Parentless Parents: How the Deaths of Our Mothers and Fathers Impact the Way We Parent Our Own Children, respondents have written broadly about the kind of proactive conversations they have with their children. Some conversations can help kids know a little more about you when you were their age. One parent writes, "I tell stories of how we celebrated together as a family when I was a child." Other parents describe taking advantage of opportunities that only show up this time of year -- whether in the kitchen, "We talk about the types of food my mother used to make," or in the living room, "I talk to my children about [my parents] as we put up the Christmas tree."

Talking isn't the only way to keep the memory of your parents alive for your children and in next week's blog I will explore some creative ideas for accomplishing the same goal.

But you can't argue with the power of good conversation. It's cheap, easy, and completely portable.

So, I have a challenge for you. In the next few days, if you find yourself out of breath with all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, and wrapping -- stop. Stop and take a deep, cleansing breath. Stop and consider how you can use the holidays to keep the memory of your parents alive for your children. And with all that extra time, talk. Talking with your children about the grandparents they never knew, or the grandparents they miss, is perhaps one of the greatest gifts you can give your children -- and it doesn't even have to go on sale.

How do you use the holidays to keep the memory of your parents alive? Let me know in the comment section below. You can also join the discussion by taking the Parentless Parents survey. I'll use your anonymous responses in my book.

***

Allison Gilbert is currently writing her third non-fiction book, Parentless Parents: How the Deaths of Our Mothers and Fathers Impact the Way We Parent Our Own Children. If you are a parent who has lost both your parents, you can help with her research by taking the Parentless Parents online survey. You can also join the "Parentless Parents" community on Facebook.

Parentless Parents will be published by Hyperion and is a follow-up to her critically acclaimed book, Always Too Soon: Voices of Support for Those Who Have Lost Both Parents. Parentless Parents will explore how the way we parent is shaped by the loss of our own mothers and fathers; how marriages are impacted when one spouse is parentless and the other is not; and offer strategies for keeping the memory of our parents alive for our children.

In Always Too Soon, Ms. Gilbert (a producer at CNN in New York and mother of two children) interviewed celebrities and others about losing their parents. She spoke with, among others, Rosanne Cash, Geraldine Ferraro, Ice-T, Yogi Berra, Mariel Hemingway, and New York Times best-selling authors, Hope Edelman and Barbara Ehrenreich. Always Too Soon sparked the formation of the Parentless Parents organization, a national network of support groups for mothers and fathers who have lost their own parents. You can find out more about Ms. Gilbert by visiting her website at www.allisongilbert.com.

Philip N. Cohen: Infertility Inequality

2009-12-15T17:41:45Z

Surrogacy as a response to infertility goes back a long way. By my literal reading of biblical stories, both Abraham and Jacob had wives (Sarah and Rachel, respectively) who, after remaining "barren" for years, offered up their handmaidens as surrogates for their husbands' heirs.

With the recent New York Times story on surrogacy gone wrong, including custom-created children (purchased eggs and sperm, and a surrogate mother), a quick check on inequality in the rates of infertility and related treatment. It's not so easy to measure - and, like most fertility measures, is usually calculated for women - but a common assessment is twelve-month failure to become pregnant after not using contraception.

Source: My chart from Bitler and Schmidt (2006).

So the haves have less infertility than the have-nots, which is not surprising considering its causes include poor overall health condition, smoking, obesity, and a history of sexually-transmitted infections. When comparable rates exist, they usually show more infertility in poor countries, too. An analysis in the journal Human Reproduction in 2007 estimated that about 70 million couples worldwide were experiencing 12-month infertility, 85% of them in the world's poor countries.

The chart also shows the privileging of access to or use of infertility treatment, of which I guess surrogacy is a particular branch (though not included here). By the way, adoption also skews toward upper-income families.

Cross posted from the Family Inequality blog.

Lisa Earle McLeod: The Duality of Parenting: The Authoritative vs. Permissive Debate

2009-12-15T14:08:56Z

What makes a perfect parent?

Is it laying down the law or accepting kids for who they are?

Is it setting high standards or providing unconditional support?

Do you expect your kids to adhere to the rules of the world? Or do you expect the world to adjust to the needs of your kid?

If ever there was a subject where people have differences of opinions, it's parenting.

Most of us tend to fall on one side or the other of the permissive vs. authoritative debate.

From the helicopter parents who hover over their kids 24/7, insulating them from hurt feelings, strict teachers, second place finishes and other realities of life, to the commanding disciplinarians who bounce quarters off beds and reign over the chore chart with an authority Patton wouldn't challenge, styles run the gamut, and everyone is convinced that their way is the best way.

The "free-to-be-you-and-me" crowd believes that their children are unique and special, and thus, should treated as such. These are the people who try to get the grading scale changed to accommodate their child and who insist that everybody get a trophy. You can spot them in public because their child is often the one riding the pony.

The other side of the spectrum is the stiff upper lip crowd, parents who believe that special treatment is for wimps. Their favorite mantras include, "Suck it up," "Tough luck," and "How is this my problem?" These are the parents who buy their kid a bike for his birthday so he'll be able to drive himself to his part-time job.

Yet as much as we may condemn, or defend, the hoverers and the disciplinarians, the inherent intent of both styles have merit.

The authoritative vs. permissive quagmire is yet another example of how either/or thinking locks us into false choices and keeps us from seeing the real truth.

Children need unconditional support AND they also need the discipline to stand on their own.

This is the duality of parenting. Just like so many other areas of our lives, it's not as simple as an either/or choice.

True success as a parent requires mastering the art of AND. (Six Simple Ways to Harness AND)

Despite being almost thirty when I began my adventures in parenting, I came into the job pretty clueless. However, when my first child was barely a month old, I read a line in a parenting book that became a guiding principle for me and forever changed the way I viewed my role. It said:

In an ideal circumstance a child is raised to believe that they are incredibly special, but no more special than anyone else.

It's been almost seventeen years since I first read that, and I continue to find that the simple elegance of this wisdom applies to every age, and every child.

Many of us were raised by well-intended parents who erred on the side of emphasizing that we were no more special than anyone else. We grew up knowing how to make our way in the world, and get along with others. Yet we also suffered from insecurity and a deep, child-like hunger for someone to see our inner magnificence. (Which explains much of our adult dysfunctional relationships.)

We were determined that things would be different for our kids. We would give them all the love and affection we wished we'd had. We wouldn't allow them to feel alone out there in the cold cruel world.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to make your child feel loved and adored, every child should feel that way.

But in trying to make our kids feel special, we sometimes forgot to tell them that everybody else is special too. And that as much as we're put on this planet to be loved, we don't experience true happiness until we learn the discipline of returning that love to others.

Parenting isn't about trying to shield your kids from set-backs, disappointments and the unfairness of life. It's about preparing them to deal with it.

It's a tricky duality to master, you have to be both supportive AND demanding.

You have to create an environment of boundless creativity AND rigorous discipline.

You to be the boss AND let them be in charge of their own decisions.

It's not about compromise or watering-down either approach, it's about combining them.

We need to be both nurturing AND tough.

And we need to honor our child's unique magnificence while at the same time, help them understand they have no more rights and privileges than anyone else on this planet.

Is hard?

Of course it is. You have to hold two ideas in your mind at the same time and simultaneously embrace two approaches at once, which is something we humans struggle with.

The Triangle of Truth is a model that enables you to assimilate seemingly conflicting ideas in a way that makes their whole greater than the sum of the parts. And there's nowhere we need this approach more than when it comes to parenting.

Parenting is powerful monarchy and indentured servitude at the same. It's the ultimate challenge in mastering dualities.

But God wouldn't have sent you such magnificent children if you weren't capable of raising them.

You hold the future of the world in your hands.

And so does everybody else.

Lisa Earle McLeod is an author, syndicated columnist, consultant and keynote speaker. Her newest book The Triangle of Truth: The Surprisingly Simple Secret to Resolving Conflicts Large and Small hits books stores January 5. More info: www.LisaEarleMcLeod.com

Laura Stepp: Twenty-Something Men Want Babies, Study Says

2009-12-15T09:00:09Z

When I first saw Ben Stone, the 23-year-old slacker in the movie "Knocked Up," get mushy over his prospective woops-baby, I thought, what a bunch of malarkey. Guys in their 20s don't want to be papas.

I may have been wrong. In a new, nationally representative survey of 18-29-year-olds, men were as likely as women to say that if circumstances allowed it, they would love to have a baby right now. We're not talking small numbers here. Among the 1,800, 20-somethings surveyed by the Guttmacher Institute, 53 percent of men and 52 percent of women gave this answer. For those 25 and older, it was two-thirds.

Most of the men and women also said that pregnancy should be planned. More than a third of the men, though, and almost half of the women, admitted they weren't using contraception regularly. Maybe they're irresponsible. Or maybe they secretly think it wouldn't be so bad to be a parent. More likely, it's a little bit of both.

"Men and women are not that different," says Freya Sonenstein, a research professor at Johns Hopkins University who studies adolescent males. "There's a high value given to having children. That's one reason why using contraception consistently is a hard job."

No young men I knew coming of age in the 1960s and '70s would have admitted to baby lust. When a young woman got pregnant, she either disappeared to Auntie's house or into a doctor's office. We whispered about her and said next to nothing about her partner.

During these years, we didn't see much of our own daddies. Like AMC's "Mad Men," they were moving up the company ladder, chasing money and pretty girls. Something happened, though, when we had our own children. "Mad Men"'s Don Draper turned into "Glee"'s Will Schuester, Fox TV's charming glee club director who wants to be a father as much as he wants to take his singers to sectionals.

Our husbands and partners have formed fatherhood groups, appeared on TV and Capitol Hill, made parenting books by fathers into bestsellers, appeared in news stories about stay-at-home dads.

Meanwhile our sons, along with our daughters, were assigned in high school to take care of plastic baby dolls in an effort to stop the rise in teen pregnancies. They listened to rappers singing about baby-daddies. Today, they see a telegenic baby-daddy in the White House who makes fathering seem more fun than running the country.

They've also come of age as the sequence of love, marriage, and baby fell apart, and this surely has affected their views on when a man can become a father.

There were several sobering findings in this survey, including how little men, in particular, knew about fertility and contraception. But let's not downplay their basic baby interest. One of the most telling things - which surveyors didn't expect - is that men were as willing as women to answer the survey's questions. And they didn't just breeze through. In fact, they took longer to finish than the women. Health professionals, hoping to reduce the high rate of unplanned pregnancies, can seize on that interest to talk to men about how much better it is for babies to be born when both parents are ready to take care of them.

Not long ago, I heard a speaker at a conference on urban fathers describe a young man who was raising a daughter of pre-school age. Some of the young man's pals paid him a visit early one morning while he was braiding her hair.

"What you doin'?" they asked.

"I ain't no punk," he answered. "That's what daddies do nowadays."
"Sure, some men still want to get their Tigers on before things settle down," says Bill Albert, deputy director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which commissioned the survey. "But the idea that there are a lot of free floaters in this generation who don't care about kids doesn't seem supported."

April Daniels Hussar: Why Can't Suri Cruise Play Dress-Up?

2009-12-14T15:12:03Z

So, now it appears that little Suri Cruise has a makeup bag. Oh, the horror! Not only do Tom and Katie let her wear high heels and flamenco dresses, but she has her OWN MAKEUP BAG! What's next -- a profile on Match.com? Her very own custom stripper pole?

Seriously, people, everyone needs to calm down about Suri's propensity to play dress-up. So she has her very own little dance shoes with heels. She just wants to be like her mama. What's so horrible about that? She obviously loves all things dress-up and girly -- she's just one of those girls. And her parents "indulge her" -- but why shouldn't they?

Read Katie Holmes Defends Suri's High Heels

The Daily Mail proclaims, direly:

Suri Cruise's love of makeup and high heels shows no sign of abating.

And despite recent criticism that she is allowing her daughter to grow up too quickly, mother Katie Holmes seems quite happy to continue to indulge her.

Katie, 30, and three-year-old Suri -- Ms. Holmes' daughter with husband Tom Cruise, 46 -- were snapped yesterday afternoon visiting the actor on the set of his upcoming film Knight and Day in Seville in Spain.

[Suri] clutched a pink makeup bag which appeared to contain an assortment of lip glosses in many different shades, although she didn't appear to be wearing any.

But in contrast, she also had a soft toy snuggled underneath her arm, which many would consider a much more appropriate accessory for a three-year-old girl.

Puh-lease. Anyone will tell you a makeup bag is MUCH more fun than a teddy bear. Just like most toddlers would rather play with their mom's car keys and cell phones than any stinky rattle.

As little girls go, there's a spectrum -- on one end is your typical tomboy, like my little sister who insisted on cutting her hair short and played with army guys until she hit puberty. On the other hand you have girls like, well, like me when I was little, and my daughter now. My favorite toys were a pair of giant rhinestone earrings and a collection of vintage hats. I lusted after Lee Press-On Nails and couldn't wait to be old enough to wear lip gloss (Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers being a poor substitute).

And then, there are all the girls in between. Suri obviously, for right now at least, falls on my end of the spectrum. And if she were my daughter, I'd do exactly what Katie's doing. Let her play.

Here's a little story. The other day my daughter, Isabella, and her playdate played dress-up. After some time up happily spent in Isabella's bedroom, pulling clothes out of drawers and enacting quick change upon quick change, they appeared downstairs, ready for a snack, dressed in a pair of fabulous outfits only a pair of 6-year-olds could love. Isabella wore shorts, a sparkly T-shirt, an Obama pin, sunglasses, a witch's hat, and -- you guessed it -- a pair of Cinderella play heels. Her playdate was slightly more understated in a summer dress, a crown, fake earrings and... another pair of high heels.

Would I have let them play outside, or even walk to the park, if the weather had been nice? Yes! Absolutely! Granted, they wouldn't have made it very far in those shoes -- but I'd have some flip-flops on hand for when they realized that. But they would have had a blast -- and despite their finery, would still have enjoyed playing outside. Believe it or not, it's possible to run and jump and swing and slide and get dirty AND wear dresses. (Yes! Even flamenco dresses!) But here's the difference between my daughter and Suri Cruise. No one's hiding outside my house, or at the park, with a telephoto lens waiting to snap her picture so the next day all the tabloids and websites can scream "ISABELLA WEARS WITCH'S HAT AND HIGH HEELS!"

On the other hand, here's another little story. When Isabella graduated from pre-school at the tender age of 5, her classmate got taken to have her "hair and makeup done" for the occasion. I was appalled.

Read Dressing Your Daughter as a Slut This Halloween?

Because there's a big difference between playing dress-up and dressing up. There's a difference between letting a little girl play with lipstick and letting her wear it out to dinner as part of her ensemble. And that's where people seem to me to be confusing things with Suri Cruise. The difference between Suri and other little girlie-girls is that Suri happens to be the daughter of two very, very famous people. Suri lives much of her life in the line of paparazzi fire.

So, you may say, where do you draw the line, lady? When it is cute and imaginative and a girlie-girl just having fun, and when does it veer into Roman Polanski territory? To some extent, that answer is different for every parent. I let Isabella wear light-colored nail polish but she does not leave the house with makeup and she does not have pierced ears and she will wear pleather over my dead body. My husband would ban all nail polish and even play-makeup in the house until she turned 35.

But, as I try to explain to him, it's not about growing up "too quickly." It's about PLAYING. She wants to be like me. She wants to dress up. Is that ALL she does? No. She plays soccer and does pottery and swims, plays hide-and-seek and a host of other good, healthy stuff. And who's to say what Suri does when she's not being snapped by photogs?

So let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here. The negotiations will get trickier as Suri and Isabella get older, but really, people -- child-size heels are not a gateway drug to 10-year-olds dressing like Lindsay Lohan.

Yes, it freaks me out that tweens are getting bikini waxes. Yes, I have a problem with slutty Halloween costumes for little girls, and precocious sweatpants with JUICY emblazoned across a child's butt. But a little girl -- who, not incidentally, is almost ALWAYS with her mother (and often her father) in these photos, not some nanny -- a little girl that loves to play dress-up? There's nothing wrong with that.

Cross-posted at BettyConfidential.com