A few weeks ago, my 5 month old 52″ HD plasma television started acting really strange. I could turn power on and off, but I couldn’t select any other inputs nor could I adjust volume.

Rule number 1: pull power from wall… didn’t work.

Rule number 2: concede defeat and call tech support.

So I called Circuit City’s technical support line, which of course was closed, and then I tried calling Panasonic’s technical support line and they were also closed. I suppose watching a DVD on the ole’ laptop wasn’t so bad.

Saturday:

Called technical support with Panasonic and received word the issue was evidently firmware related. Now for all of you old timers out there, did you know televisions now have microprocessors and firmware? I’m used to this on computers and copiers, but not televisions. Will the wonders never cease.

I digress. They decided to mail me firmware. This would take a week to reach me… not good, but a decent fall back option if I run into problems.

Monday:

I’m over the fact that I couldn’t achieve technical support instant gratification, and called Circuit City’s technical support line one more time. I got a scheduler on the line, and someone was to be dispatched to my house on Thursday.

We are moving up in the world at least.

Wednesday:

Get a call from the proprietor of the local servicing agency and we talk through some things. He kindly offers to run out because he thinks it should be a 5 minute fix to re-flash the firmware.

The Cavalry Arrive:

The same gentlemen I spoke with pulls up driving a really big, red truck. He comes to the door wearing thick, square glasses and talked with a heavy southern accent. Seemed like a really nice guy.

He pulls out his paperwork with the SD card and walks over to the television. He stoops over to put the SD card in the slot, stops, and leans in closer. He looks back at me, and then again at the small slot in the front of the television.

He stands up, and looks at me and asks if I know how a quarter might have gotten put in the slot.

Ahh, the love of a child…

As he proceeded to clear the jam and hand me the quarter, I thanked him profusely for his visit, realizing he didn’t have to cover the problem under warranty.

I called my daughter down and begin to calmly explain the situation. She of course looks puzzled and asks, “It’s not a piggy bank?”

Well, if it is, that is the most expensive piggy bank I’ve ever seen. I will tell you all friends, the price of a quarter went way up.

My three-year-old has been really hung up on monsters lately. I believe it started with the Halloween skeleton hanging in the garage. He saw it a few weeks ago and then he started asking me about monsters all day long and every night before bed - asking me if monsters exist, why was there a monster in our garage, do monsters eat children, were monsters going to get him?

Of course I said no. No, no - monsters do not exist. You are safe. Mommy would never let anything bad happen to you.

But I lied.

Monsters do exist, as is evident in every day news. This last week alone, our oceanside town was the host for alleged child rape and vehicular homicide. Last summer a string of burglaries had us all locking our windows and doors a little more often. Monsters break into homes and do horrible things as they did in this seemingly-safe Connecticut town last year. (A story I personally can’t forget; it haunts me.)

So how do I look at my three-year-old’s beautiful and innocent face and not lie - he should not yet know such horrors - but how do I teach him to be safe at the same time? And when do you stop lying? Do you teach them that monsters do exist? If so, when - and how?

We teach our children to not talk to strangers but then many of us prance them to the local mall once a year and plop them on some stranger’s lap, letting them take candy and share their biggest wishes. We tell them that they should never take direction from an adult stranger yet we send them off to classes and school without always taking the appropriate time to introduce them to their teachers, school bus drivers and other influencing adults. We hand them over to virtual strangers who come and go in their lives - and who, no matter how much we check, can be unpredictable and sometimes turn dangerous.

How do you handle teaching your children to be safe but not scared, bold but not disrespectful? I want my sons to speak up and push back if someone ever makes them uncomfortable - but teaching them the boundaries about when, where, how and to whom to push back on is a challenge.

I hate seeing my sons get older and the beautiful veil of trusting innocence slowly lifted to reveal so much ugliness in the world. It’s heartbreaking sometimes as they ask me questions about some of the less-pleasant things they begin to learn in life. Why did that man have to die mommy? Does it hurt to die? What is prison? Who goes there? Will I ever meet a bad man? No one would ever want to hurt me, right Mommy?

For now, I do lie to keep them innocent a little longer. But as they grow, I realize I have to accept that they are going to find out about the monsters in life. And it’s up to me (and others who love them) to help teach them how to avoid those monsters when necessary but not obsessively worry over them. Unlike the skeleton hanging in the garage, real life monsters are not so easily explained away.

Addendum 8/31/20008: A perfect example of this challenge - last night we were at a beach BBQ with several other families. As with any event where there are a lot of children, it was loud, slightly chaotic and full of nonstop activity. As darkness fell, we handed the children glow sticks so they’d still be easy to see. Suddenly, my husband and I realized our six-year-old had strayed from the group and was up by the seawall. He was talking to some man sitting and  having a cigarette. When we pulled our son back to the party and reiterated how he is not supposed to talk to strangers, he said “But Mommy, I thought he was with the party.” Case in point - we had just introduced the poor kid to a ton of new people and it was hard for him to discern that this person so close to our group wasn’t actually part of the group. Another example of the challenge in helping them to learn when it’s okay to talk to someone and when it isn’t.

Christine Perkett is a busy mom of two active boys, ages 3 and 6. As a working mother, Christine spends every day trying to maintain balance between her passion for family and motherhood, and her drive to run a successful business - she is the President and Founder of PerkettPR.

Christine also blogs at PerkettPRsuasion, WomenforHire Training4Dublin and My Not So Personal Life. She is currently featured in the New York Times bestseller, “Will Work From Home“  and often speaks on social media, PR and business. Connect with Christine on Linkedin, Facebook, or Twitter - or just about any social network under “missusP.”

Last week, CNN.com reported that over 200,000 children in the US were spanked at school in the 2006-2007 school year.  As I read the article (with this blog post in mind), I took note of what I felt were some the key takeaways:

• Corporal punishment is legal in 21 states, but only used frequently in 13
• Texas led the paddling pack with 48,197 students receiving CP that year
• CP was disproportionately applied to Black students (17.1% of the population received 35.6% of those swats, and was 1.4 times more likely to be paddled than White students)
• A mother whose 13-year-old son was paddled was told by school administrators that paddling is “the quick and dirty way of dealing with discipline problems”

I was originally going to focus this piece on the utter dearth of empirical support for corporal punishment (sorry, my access to EBSCOhost is limited over the summer), but then I got to the user comments, where I was taken aback by the overwhelming support for corporal punishment in schools.  Scroll down to the end of the article to the “Sound Off” section (can’t link to it directly) to read the comments.

Go ahead; I’ll wait.

…

Please don’t get me wrong, folks: I’m not here to tell you how to raise or punish your kids, and I know that the spank/no-spank debate is a hot-button issue on wildly successful dates in parenting circles.  My concern in this instance stems not from whether or not people spank their kids, but rather that so many people seem willing to put this decision in the hands of their children’s schools.

Postscript: As I read this article, I was reminded of someone I once knew who told me she “could not wait” for her son to turn 1 so she could start spanking him (not sure how she came by that magic metric).  We had quite a few discussions about parenting, but never did I feel less comfortable than when she’d talk about spanking with such fervor.  I always thought the phrase “a gleam in one’s eye” was just a figure of speech until I heard her wax romantic about the ways she could, would, and did spank her child.

Damian Bariexca is a high school English teacher/school psychologist from Perkasie, PA.  He has blogged about education, technology, and psychology at Apace of Change since 2007, and has two children, Dylan and Kiera. Damian can be found on Twitter and Identi.ca as @damian613.

I had an interesting exchange about parenting via Twitter last night.  One person I follow sent out a “tweet” about trying to get his 6-month old to sleep.  Another person I follow responded with something to the effect of: “…Ferber is your friend.”  I challenged him on that, and an interesting “twitversation” ensued.

I’m sure most of you are familiar with what I’ll simply refer to as the Sleep Wars.  In education, we have the Reading Wars between supporters of whole language instruction and supporters of phonics-based instruction.  In parenting, I find a similar dichtoomy.  When it comes to facilitating sleep for children, there are those that support and/or practice the “cry it out” method widely attributed to Dr. Ferber (many, in fact, refer to this method as “Ferberizing” your child).  Then there are those that don’t “Ferberize.”  There are certainly variants of the “cry it out” method, and even Dr. Ferber has softened his stance a bit.

My wife and I have never let our son cry for more than a minute or two without comforting him in some way.  That’s a fairly unusual approach, and that was reinforced last night as other Twitterers mentioned their “success” with the Ferber method.  One of my followers did offer his allegiance to my stance, and that was nice.  But, overall, this was another reminder of how marginal my wife and I are with respect to our parenting orientation.  Beyond just the sleep issue, there are many aspects of parenting where we think and act differently than the vast majority of parents.  That sort of marginalization can be isolating and frustrating; loneliness is not an uncommon feeling.  In one of my final “tweets” last night, I suggested that I would stop tweeting and go back to my natural and attachment parenting island.

Marginalized feelings notwithstanding, an amazing thing (or series of things) has happened for my wife (and, therefore, for me and my son).  When we moved to Virginia, we imagined it would be especially hard for her to find like-minded mothers with whom she could socialize and from whom she could find support.  After all, this was the heart of the Confederacy and a “red state.”  However, in the month or so before we moved here, my wife did a little Internet research and found a Richmond-based support group through Attachment Parenting International.  She contacted the coordinator of that group, started meeting others in the group after we moved here, and remains friendly with the coordinator still.  Then, shortly after moving down here, she learned of a Richmond-based “natural and attachment parenting” (NAP) group that maintains a very active online forum.  There are over 100 members of the forum, at least a dozen or so of whom are regular contributors to the forum.  My wife is reading or posting to the forum nearly every free moment she has, and she (and my son) attend a lot of playdates and events arranged through the forum.  Real friendships with like-minded mothers are developing as a result.

I’ve written about the power of hybrid (virtual + face-to-face) communities in the education contexts (see e.g. this blog post).  For my wife, this hybrid natural and attachment parenting (NAP) community has comforted her in so many ways.  She is a happier and more confident person now that she has the support and collegiality of these women.

In his book on Unconditional Parenting, Alfie Kohn jokes that instead of using “brain surgery” as the standard bearer of all things difficult, when trying to suggest that he is doing something that is easy or simple, he’ll say, “it’s not like I’m parenting or anything.”  Parenting IS incredibly difficult, but like most things in life, it can be so much easier when you have support from a community.  I would also add that for those who feel marginalized in any way, the community-building capacity of the Internet is an extraordinary development.  It has been amazing for us.

In September of 2007, Jon, Jacqui and Drew Becker (and their two cats Willie and Ubie) left the familial comforts of New York and relocated to Richmond, Virginia. There, Jon works as an assistant professor of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU); Jacqui maintains a small, private psychotherapy practice. Jon also blogs at Educational Insanity. Read more about Jon on the Dads page…

Ok, I admit it. When I offered to review Bath By Bettijo’s Sweet B. skin care line for children, my motives were completely selfish. So, when the package arrived with bath products that I could try, too, I was pretty excited.

I tried three products:

Lavender Soothing Baby Oil ($14.50)

Organic Shampoo & Wash ($16.50)

Shea Butter Soothing Lotion ($16.50)

All three felt completely luxurious. I love the smell of natural products. The baby oil and the lotion are my favorites of the three. The baby oil isn’t greasy, smells like lavender and gave me a reason to pause for a minute after a busy day and a splashy bath time to rub Braxton’s feet, legs, arms and belly. And surprisingly, he paused too. Anything that can create special quiet moments with a toddler is worth any price!

The lotion smells like shea butter, which I love, and is thick and soothing. It goes on clean and absorbs quickly. After spending too much time in the sun last weekend, I don’t think another product on the planet could have felt as good on my skin. Oh, and I’m sure Braxton agrees, too. If your tot has mild eczema or super sensitive skin, shea butter can work wonders.

The shampoo & wash was also terrific. We used it mostly as a wash and it had the lightest scent of the three products.

Other products also available in this line: Babybottom Balm, baby powder and hair conditioner.

I absolutely recommend these products. Soothing, luxurious and good for mom and baby.

Win These!

We have 1 Sweet b. Shea Butter Soothing Lotion and 1 Sweet b. Organic Shampoo & Wash for our readers - all you need to enter is leave a comment here. The contest will end September 2nd and the winner will be notified by email shortly after. Super easy to enter, why not try?

Kelli is mom to Braxton, age 2, and partner to Mike. She is an instructor at the University of Oregon and a public relations consultant with her own firm. Thanks to growing up in a large family, she’s learned to manage chaos and still have fun. You can read her posts here.

After my first official day of work at my new job, I picked up my 8 year old from his first day of school. He attends an after school childcare program on site, and there were new forms and procedures to go over, so it wasn’t exactly the “Hallmark moment” that it should have been. (I did make a mental note to thank my husband for following through on the agreed-upon attire, as I glanced at his favorite new shirt and shorts,  white socks and and gleaming white tennis shoes.)

I gave him a quick squeeze and we headed out the door. As we crossed the parking lot to the van, I said, “So? Tell me all about it! How was your first day, buddy?”

“It was the worst day of my life. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Well. There’s a reply that you just don’t want to hear on the first day of school. Now, granted, my son DOES take a while to “warm up” to new teachers. Every year, from kindergarten through first and second grades, he has NOT liked his teacher until some time after the second or third week. I guess he just takes a while to figure them out, but it’s smooth sailing after that. So, as we separated to get into our respective sides of our minivan, I took a deep breath and braced myself for the disappointment.

“What happened?” (I’d forgotten how hard it is to hug your child across the van console, Rather unsatisfying.)

“Well, first of all, [the after school program that's just been taken over by our park district] is really dumb and boring. There’s nothing to do! And no one would play with me. Jeffrey and Sebastian just wanted to play with the LEGOs the whole time, and we didn’t even get to go outside to the playground!”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry. That’s tough ~ when your friends want to do something that you don’t want to do. What did you do in your classroom today?”

“Mostly just practiced taking out and putting away our new supplies. I don’t understand why we had to do that, since we took all of our supplies up to school and put them all away the other night!” (Well, frankly, neither do I… and that DOES sound rather boring.)

“Did your teacher read you a story today?” (No.)

“Did you go to music class? I think the schedule said you have music on Thursdays.” (Really stretching to find something positive now…)

“Yes, but we didn’t do any music today. They just talked about rules.” (Wow. In music class? How many rules can there be? Surely not 40 minutes worth!)

“Hm. I’m sorry, honey. I hoped you’d had a great day. I thought about you all day.”

“Yeah. It was awful. And even at lunch recess, not one would play with me. I was playing with William and Angel, but then they decided to go play with Nathan. Yuck! So I was bored, even then.”

“Well, why don’t you grab a snack and go pet Cooper for a little while. Maybe you’ll feel better in a little bit. I think Alex might be up for playing some computer games with you before dinner. OK?”

I was having a hard time figuring out how to deal with this, honestly. As a teacher, I work really hard to make each child know that I’m glad they are in my class, that I care about them, and that we’re going to have a lot of fun learning together. And while I recognize the need for some structure and high expectations, I don’t waste time on the first day going over these things. I model the behaviors as they come up throughout the year. I’d much rather spend the first day getting to know my students and letting them get a glimpse of who I am. Still, we are all different. Every teacher approaches these things differently. And, wearing the two hats of parent and teacher means that you consider carefully - much more carefully - whether each problem is worthy of contacting the teacher. It is SO easy to take the wrong path and become over-involved in your child’s school experience too early, putting a perfectly good teacher on the defense and ruining the potential for a perfectly good relationship for the rest of the year.

But… “the worst day of my life”? On the first day of school? I wanted to cry.

Later, as the boys settled into a brotherly bonding over a good game of “Age of Mythology,” I gave my oldest an appreciative shoulder-pat. He returned a knowing smile. I gave my youngest a quick shoulder-squeeze and as my cheek brushed his, the heat was alarming.

I put my hand on his forehead and said, “Honey, you’re burning up!” He turned toward me, and I caught the tell-tale flush and slightly duller eyes. I took out the ear thermometer. Seconds later, the numbers told the story ~ 101.6° F.

So, on my second day of my new job, I took a sick day. (Wow, way to start the year off with first impressions!)

Yet, I hope that the sacrifice of an extra day at home makes him less susceptible to the viruses next week. More importantly, I hope that the fact that he was feeling poorly had a distinct effect on his ability to assess the worthiness of his first day. But mostly, I hope that when he returns to school, he’ll have a warm and caring welcome back, and that his next days in third grade will not be quite so horrendous in his mind.

I’m so torn over this. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Image: http://wordle.net/

Kymberli Mulford is the proud mom of a grade-schooler and high-schooler in the Chicago suburbs, and the proud grandmother of her now-grown stepson’s four children. When she’s not shuttling her sons from one activity to another, she works in the world of educational technology – now as an “Engaged Learning Speciliast,” and previously as a Technology Coordinator for a special education co-op, as a learning facilitator in a large district that implemented a one-to-one laptop initiative for all students in grades 3-6, as a consultant and presenter, and most recently as a blogger at Onionskin. For more of Kymberli’s “mom” posts click here!

From a very interesting article in BusinessWeek titled “MBA Moms Most Likely to Opt Out” -

Williams said she believes that what has been termed the “opt-out revolution,” the notion that working women choose parenting over building their careers, is more complicated than meets the eye. Men who are in the upper ranks of their profession with stay-at-home-wives earn 30% more than men who are married to women who work, she said. Those men who want to reach the highest rungs of their career and earn the most money often need a stay-at-home wife to take care of all other aspects of their life, including raising a family, Williams said. “And since many women in business school marry those men, they end up being stay-at-home wives, regardless of their own vision of what they wanted from their careers,” Williams said.

Wow.

Full article: MBA Moms Most Likely to Opt Out by Alison Damast - BusinessWeek, August 21, 2008

When I was growing up, living with my Grandmother, we got up every Saturday morning and cleaned the house. You did your chores before you got to do anything else. No exceptions. If you just did it and didn’t gripe too much, the cleaning took maybe an hour (it wasn’t a big house, and there were a couple of us doing the work). For me, it was a big lesson in “just suck it up and do it and it will be done quickly.” It took me a while to figure it out though. When I first started living with Grandma, I tried a lot of bargaining to get out of the cleaning. I never won that debate.

My little guy turned 3 in June and I think it’s time to start the Saturday morning cleanup. He picks up his toys, takes his dishes to the sink after meals, and helps me water the plants. He’s pretty good about doing those things without too much griping. That’s all fine and good. My challenges come in two forms: (1) I’m impatient when it comes to cleaning, and (2) I’m lazy.

Impatience Anyone?

I don’t know if it’s a hold-over from my childhood, but I just want the cleaning done and to get on with the rest of my day. That wouldn’t be a big deal except that I often take over the tasks I’ve asked my son to do so that they’ll get done quickly. I don’t know how much Nicholas has caught onto that yet (probably completely, he’s smart), but I’ve got to put a stop to it. Do you find yourself doing that? When a task will go a lot faster and be done better if you do it, you just take over for your child? I know this tendancy isn’t good for either of us, but I seem to have fallen into that pattern.

Lazy!

I’m lazy. Or overly tired. I can’t decide which is more accurate. When we wake up on Saturday mornings, I just want to be lazy and snuggle in bed with my Fella and my boy. Who wants to get up and clean and organize when there are two warm bodies waiting for hugs and a cozy bed to snuggle in? The problem is, that if I don’t do the cleaning and get it done pretty early in the morning, I tend not to do it. And then I spend the next week griping about how I should have cleaned Saturday morning :). Stupid, I know. The more important issue when I don’t clean is that Nicholas has allergy-induced asthma, and I feel like he does better if the house is fairly dust-free. That means dusting and vaccuming. Yuck.

How do you do it?

What is your family’s routine for cleaning and other chores? How much do you put your kids to work? Are you often tempted to do it yourself? How do you stop yourself from taking over?

I’m interested to see how you all manage the work in your families.

Sherry Carr Deer is a Mommy to Nicholas who just turned 3, fiance to William, the widow of Mark, and a PR professional at a non-profit hospital. You can read more of her posts here.