Here’s a report I could classify as a “No, duh.” After almost nine years of living with at least one child, there is now a study to confirm one of the reasons I have steadily gained weight. The report, coming out of the University of Iowa, says that adults who live with children consume more fat (http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.php?)feed=Science&article=UPI-1-20061229-19350600-bc-us-fatadults.xml) than those minus kids. That makes sense. How often do we give in to serving the meals that our kids will eat, which frequently is full of satisfying fat? And how many of us have finished that plate of chicken fingers after eating our own meal?
So, now that all this is confirmed, how do we keep our hands off that unifinished cheeseburger? One way is to simply order less food for yourself, knowing that you will have leftovers from the kiddies. Another way is to help teach good eating habits to our kids by preparing and ordering less fattening food for them. Some restaurants now serve grilled chicken strips and offer vegetables instead of the french fries. With that kind of fare on the tempting plate next to you, you’ll be finishing off food with less calories.
To make eating both fun AND nutritious, here’s another, rather unconventional suggestion. There’s new book by Malcolm Kushner, called California Squisine (http://www.californiasquisine.com/). The book offers recipes for mixing fruits and vegetables and other healthy stuff into squeezable toppings for other food. It’s a squishy and silly idea and the book has great recipes.
Friends of ours, Deborah Landau (an amazing, award-winning poet: http://www.anhinga.org/books/book_info.cfm?title=Orchidelirium), her bizarrely funny husband Mark, and two sons make an annual end-of-the-year trip from NYC to visit their West Coast friends, including us. We get to hang out together on New Year’s Eve. Almost nine years ago, we met at a prenatal class and had our first-borns in the same hospital on the same day. They are special people to us and spending New Year’s Eve with them is a wonderful tradition. For other ideas on a family New Year’s, read http://www.familymanonline.com/moms_and_dads.php?id=66.
For me, it’s been another whirlwind year of parenting, working, and trying to find time for everything else I love (my wife, my family and friends, myself!). My oldest son changed schools, my middle son is becoming more aware of ways to channel his impulsiveness, and my littlest one has found every possible method to be noticed as Son #3. With all the advice I give, this year’s end is one of the millions of times I try to heed some of my own suggestions about accepting my many imperfections and focusing on living in the present.
Of my numerous New Year’s Resolutions, two are old standby’s. One is to get back in good physical shape (http://www.familymanonline.com/columns.php?id=27), especially since my doctor just prescribed cholesterol medication for me. The other is to find ways to not lose my temper around my kids so much(http://www.familymanonline.com/columns.php?id=3). They know I love them, but they don’t like me when I get angry with them or for other reasons in their presence. An occasional top-blower may be OK, but I’ve been letting life’s frustrations make me into an ogre far too often, so this is one goal I need to prioritize.
What are your thoughts on the year’s finale and New Year’s resolutions?
Journalist Debbe Geiger asked me for some suggestions on what to do with the kids while they’re out on winter break. She specifically requested ideas that wouldn’t break Mom and Dad’s bank. My comments appear in her Newsday article (http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/localguide/kids/ny-lskids1224,0,163658.story?coll=ny-explore-kids-heads). Here are a few of my tips to help you between now and when the kids head back to school.
1. Visit Libraries - Go to the local library and loiter for a few hours. Browse books, read, check a few out. It’s a great way to explore and it costs nothing. Also, visit other libraries in your town or nearby areas. Try libraries with different ethnic themes, historical angles, and university book collections, too.
2. Play Games - Hang out and play old board games. Use this time to teach your kids your favorites. Play card games, Nerf basketball, and make up games, too. You can even try your hand at one of those video games your kids ask you to play with them. It’s a chance for them to teach you something.
3. Visit Museums - You have probably heard this suggestion before, but here’s a twist to it. Visit a museum, then go home and do art projects based on what you and your children saw. Hang the art in a gallery-style exhibit on a wall. It’s a good way to reinforce what they’ve learned and show them you’re proud of their art.
4. Teach Planning and Budgeting - With a little extra time during this break, educate your children on how to plan for outings and budget for them, too. Have them estimate the time it takes to do a road trip and how much a tank of gas will cost. Ask them to plan a dinner, budget for the food, and shop for it. They can cook with you, with you showing them how to measure and time the preparation. In this way, they learn a lot about math and life skills without even realizing it’s educational.
5. Set Goals for the New Year - Let your kids be like you and write down their resolutions or goals for the new year. Ask them to prioritize their aspirations and remind them that, while it’s hard to fulfill all our plans, it’s important to consider what we want and need to do to make our year great.
Whatever you do, enjoy the break and Happy Holidays!
As reported in The Washington Post earlier this month (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/05/AR2006120501712.html), Mary Cheney, the daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, is pregnant. While this news is normally cause for congratulations to the expectant couple, the fact that Mary Cheney is openly gay and in a 15-year relationship with another woman, Heather Poe, has fueled a vigorous debate in the media and beyond.
This high-profile pregnancy brings the subject of same-sex parenting into a bright spotlight, with opinions running the ideological gamut. I think this public discussion, though it has gotten quite heated in some circles, is healthy because it allows the populace to consider diverse thoughts. My hope is that greater understanding will emerge.
I plan to write more about this topic in the future, but there are two points I’ll make for now. One is that I believe same-sex parenting does not adversely affect the children involved. Love, guidance, and firm commitment are among the primary requirements for being a good parent. Parents, be they gay or straight, will succeed or fail based on their fulfillment of these basics for their children. While I have seen the superb parenting of same-sex couples, I also find support in the studies of the American Academy of Pediatrics (http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/pediatrics;109/2/341?maxtoshow=&HITS=&hits=&RESULTFORMAT=&searchid=1149709147203_1835) and the American Psychological Association (http://www.apa.org/pi/lgbc/publications/lgparenting.pdf), which conclude that children suffer no psychosocial gaps from being raised by two parents of the same gender.
I also believe that there are significant benefits to bringing opposite-sex role models into the lives of the children of gay parents or, for that matter, any children who are without the influence of a consistent and responsible opposite-sex parent. Examples of possible role models are adult siblings of the parents, best friends, and even grandparents. For kids of lesbian parents, having a positive male role model for a boy or girl can enhance the child’s understanding of others and of him- or herself as he or she matures. The same goes for gay male parents’ kids, who can be more fully informed about themselves and others when they are around positive female role models.
There is so much more to be said on this subject and I encourage your thoughts. I know that all of us share in the goal of bringing up happy and healthy children.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) is coming out strong in an effort to more effectively protect our children from the harms of advertising (http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/dec06advertising.htm). Referencing the estimate that children view up to 40,000 ads per year — seen on everything from TV and billboards to the Internet and school bathroom stalls – the AAP worries that the exposure may lead to more problems with obesity, substance abuse, and poor nutrition.
The group has many ideas, including political advocacy to curb the advertising that reaches our kids. But the most important recommendation is to make our children more “media literate” to understand the messages being sent to them. I think media literacy is a great tactic because it accepts the reality of agressive advertising and suggests fighting back with education. Other than the excellent idea of turning off the TV more often, we must make our kids aware of what they’re seeing during normal children’s programming (all of those sugared-cereal ads!) and sports programming (how do commercials about erectile dysfunction affect them?). We should explain to our kids that some ads are fun to watch but the advertisers really want us to buy their products, even if they can be bad for our health.
To teach them more organically, it would be an interesting experiment to videotape your own commercial with your kids and ask them what their message and end goal are for that video. When possible, we may also want to use digital video recorders and teach our young ones to skip over the commercials while watching them via these recorders.
In the La Vega school district, nearby Waco, Texas, a pre-kindergarten student hugged a teacher’s aid and proceeded to rub his face in her chest (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16159302/). Subsequently, the school suspended the child for what administrators called “inappropriate physical behavior interpreted as sexual contact and/or sexual harassment.”
I don’t know a heckuva lot of details about the case, but does a hug and a nuzzle from a preschooler make it sexual in nature? Even if this small child knew what he was doing, would it not be better to teach him about physical boundaries — that a hug would be fine but not the chest snuggling? Really, we have to be careful about turning our children completely off of physical contact. Yes, they need to know limits, but this seems unfairly punitive.
The New York City Board of Health voted to bar the city’s restaurants from the use of trans fats in their cooking oils, by July 2007, and foods, by July 2008 (http://www.webmd.com/content/article/130/117705.htm). Trans fats, commonly found in hydrogenated cooking oils which can stay preserved much longer than non-hydrogenated ones, have long been used because they are inexpensive and may even add some desired texture to the foods they are used in. However, they have been cited by health experts as a factor in increasing the risk of heart disease. Countless grocery products now proudly display labels that claim their ingredients no longer contain trans fats and even KFC and Taco Bell (which is dealing with other health issues due to an e coli scare - http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-taco9dec09,0,4086098.story?coll=la-headlines-business) plan to stop using trans fats in their cooking oils.
Kudos to NYC for leading the way on this health issue. Yes, it makes things tougher for the restaurants, but it will likely help those restaurants attract new customers who come into the gastronomically famous metropolis to eat healthy and, heaven knows, very well. The city of Chicago is said to be considering a similar ban, but one that may not be as pervasive.
Twenty-one years ago, I started writing music critiques of albums that ranged from Miles Davis to Miami Sound Machine. If you had told me that I’d be expounding on the merits of kids’ albums two decades after conducting interviews with George Benson and Melissa Etheridge, I’d have laughed and maybe even sneered (given my musical snobbishness back then). However, regular readers of the Family Man Recommends section know that I take great joy in reviewing the latest family-oriented albums because they have consistently risen to (or above) the level of the best music in the grown-up genres.
So, it’s with pride that I present to you the first yearly Family Man Recommends Top 10 Family Albums of the year. The following CDs represent the finest of those I actually had a chance to listen to and they all had to be released between November, 2005, and the end of October, 2006. To learn more about a number of these picks, click on the review next to the title.
A few other excellent albums did not quite make the cut because of the date constraints, namely, Buck Howdy’s Giddyup! album (http://www.familymanonline.com/recommends.php?id=18) and SteveSongs’ Marvelous Day. I know there are more great ones, so please send in your thoughts on these or other CDs that were your favorites this past year.
Thanks to a couple of my high-school students who introduced me to the music of John Mayer, I’ve become a big fan of the pop and blues star. The fact that he’s popular with teenagers is encouraging, especially when his most recent single, “Waiting On the World to Change,” talks about a generation that is starting to think about how they will lead us into the next era. But a key sentiment in the lyrics and title involves a cynicism that, while it seems motivational to Mayer, may be a bit darker in other young people.
I recently read a gaggle of practice SAT essays on a question that asks the question: ‘Does the future look bright?’ Of the papers I looked over, maybe two of them showed a sense of hope for the years to come. The rest of the essays talked about war, terrorism, pollution, diminishing resources, intolerance, and a host of other worldly ills as they argued that the future looks dim. Sadly, few of the students had any answers for how to make things better, which is what worries me.
This is certainly not the only sign of resignation from our youth but, if anything, it is one that should inspire us, as parents, to do something positive. We need to work much harder to give our children hope. Maybe this can be chalked up to teenage depression, but I seem to recall — when I was a lad — that we had more of a feeling that the world had room to grow. Instead, I’m reading the words of kids who think we’ve ruined it for them. We’ve got a lot to do, folks, and I, for one, still have hope that we can make the world a much better place. We need to give our children confidence that they’re not heading into a losing situation. More than ever, I encourage your feedback on this. What can we do to inspire hope and idealism in our kids?
