I will forever and always remember when I got in trouble for saying my first curse word. I was in kindergarten, and one day was trying peel a pear I’d picked from a tree in our backyard when I commented “this pear is as hard as a damn rock.”

My mother, in the next room asked me what I said and I repeated it, innocently wondering why she had that look on her face. I was sent to my room and told never to use such language again.

Damn was just a word I’d heard some big kids use on the school bus, and I think I was throwing it in there to sound like a big kid myself. I had no idea it was not permitted in my house, even though I’d never used it heard there. (I can still count on one hand the times I’ve heard my mother curse, and one of those was when she got her finger under the needle of the sewing machine!)

I got to thinking about all this again recently after we spent a family movie night watching Julie & Julia. It was a PG-13 movie with no nudity or violence, but there was a scene where two women talk about being a bitch, and there’s one (really unnecessary) use of the F-word.

I don’t like my girl to hear bad language, but there’s only so many G-rated movies out there (the only ones I think you can count on to not have bad language, it seems lately) and the story was a good one.

My course of action for dealing with this sort of thing has always been to point out to her the words that are not acceptable in our house - so that she will avoid the fate I had of not knowing I was doing anything my parents thought wrong. But, I have to wonder, if hearing that language too often makes it “not a big deal” and therefore all the more acceptable for her to use when she wants to be a “big kid.”

I really began to think about this the next morning as I heard my husband discussing the topic with his mother and saying that “bitch” is becoming not such a bad word anymore.

I pondered … it wasn’t that long ago that my girl was learning at preschool and grade school that “stupid” was a bad word. If she and her playmates heard someone use it, they reacted as if they’d said something horrible. Is this the same society that will come to feel that bitch is a socially acceptable word to use to describe someone? 

No matter that I tell her differently, or even that I model it by not cursing in front of her, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker says that children are far more influenced by their peers.

And they will be influenced by what they see and hear on television and movies. Heaven help us when it’s foul-mouthed kids like the character Hit-Girl in the recent movie “Kick-Ass.”

What’s a parent to do?

Image via Creative Commons by Carolyn Tiry.

Last night my (all be it overtired) girl had a major meltdown and laid two tons of guilt on me because she was, apparently, the only first grader who didn’t have a parent come to any of their field trips.

This, after I’d just left work an hour early that day to go get in lake water and ride an tube behind a boat with her. This, after I’d taken off half a day of work last week to paint faces at her school field day.

I tell ya, I don’t get no respect, no respect. (she says in her best Rodney Dangerfield impression)

I know I’m not alone in dealing with this sort of thing. If you Google “mom guilt” it returns 2,350,000 results. One of the top results is another blog named workingmomsagainstguilt.com. In a BabyCenter survey, 94 percent of moms said they feel shame over issues ranging from the amount of time they spend with their kids to the kind of diapers they use.

And while the recent article “31 Reasons You Shouldn’t Feel Mom Guilt” is pretty funny (#3 reminds me of last night’s meltdown and #22 hits a little too close to home for my husband’s taste), it doesn’t really do much to assuage my guilt over having the only child (yeah, right) who didn’t have a parent come on a field trip in first grade.

So, what will I do? I will count my blessings for a flexible workplace that rewards me for results instead of face time and I’ll leave early today to make the last hour of this field trip/end of school party at the park.

How do you deal with your Mom Guilt? And, is there such a thing as Dad Guilt?

After work today, I met my husband and daughter at the park and on first look I thought she’d left the house wearing only a shirt! When I asked where her pants were she assured me that she had shorts on under the shirt (which barely covered her bottom).

She knew I wasn’t pleased, though, and on the way home we talked about the need for wearing something on the bottom that’s longer than the top; but, she still had to get in a couple of comments about how her outfit was “stylish” and I wasn’t letting her be “stylish.”

Parent challenge of the day … how to tell a seven-year-old the difference between stylish, sexy and slutty?

The timing was interesting as earlier in the day I’d read a post on GamePolitics.com about a report out of the UK by Dr. Linda Papadpoulos (”glamorous psychologist forever popping up on daytime television“) in which they said she noted: “High street stores sell video games where the player can beat up prostitutes with bats and steal from them in order to facilitate game progression,” leading to the following “clear” message to girls that this type of media portrays, as interpreted by the doctor, “… young girls should do whatever it takes to be desired. For boys the message is just as clear: be hyper-masculine and relate to girls as objects.”

Games were actually only a portion of the media examined. Dr. Papadopoulos talks about the impacts of the Internet in this video.

One of the key recommendations in the report included ensuring that music videos featuring sexual posing or sexually suggestive lyrics are broadcast only after the “watershed” (which means 9:00 p.m until 5:30 a.m.).

Here in the U.S., I know sexual content can be found on our television at earlier hours than that. “Two and a Half Men” on at 8:00 p.m. in my time zone, for example, has plotlines that frequently revolve around the character Charlie’s womanizing sex life.

We do our best to avoid these shows (thank goodness my girl and I both like Food Network), but it’s impossible for me to shield her from sexual themes and images all the time.

So, how do you discuss what is appropriately stylish for a nearly tween girl to wear?

My husband and daughter went camping this weekend. I had two nights and two days to myself and what did I do? I looked around the quiet house and came to this conclusion: if there is a flat surface around, we will cover it with stacks of stuff.

Tables, countertops, footstools, nightstands, dressers, even the dog crates. Everything was covered in clutter. Especially the closets.

A top article on clutter in Google search results comes from AARP’s magazine and its arthur notes:

In Dante’s Inferno there is a circle of Hell reserved for two warring armies, the Hoarders and the Wasters, who spend eternity rolling enormous boulders at each other on a desolate sun-baked plain. The boulders are actually diamonds and represent the possessions they had such unhealthy relationships with during their lives. “Why do you hord?” the Wasters shout. “Why do you waste?” the Hoarders scream back. This repeats, endlessly, joint punishment for their respective sins.

While our clutter does seem a bit hellish at times, in keeping with the rest of my life, it seems hoarding is only one of my many clutter personalities.

Organized Homes says “take aim on your household’s clutter problem by going to the root of the problem: your own thinking.” They outline four types of thinking that lead to clutter:

• The Hoarder who fears they won’t have what they need if they let go of anything.
• The Deferrer who like Scarlett O’Hara prefers to think about it tomorrow.
• The Rebel who is still mad at Mom for making them pick up their room and wash the dishes.
• The Perfectionist who must have the perfect organizer or label system before they’ll even start.

So how to tackle those things we put in between us and our clutter? Good Housekeeping has a neat online tool to help kickstart you. You use drop-down menus to select the portions of your home and room that you want to clean and it provides you with tips specific to that area.

I chose to tackle two closets during my free time this weekend. I gave in to the Perfectionist a bit and bought a few new things to help, but my Deferrer was banished and I told my Hoarder to get over it.

The rooms the closets reside in may be an even bigger mess than they were before, but boy it sure feels good to look in those hidden storage areas now.

Anyone else got the Spring cleaning bug? How do I keep the momentum going to attack the rest of the clutter?

Driving my daughter to school this morning, I heard my morning radio show discussing a new study out that says if you want your kids to be passionate about art or athletics, you need to leave them alone.

Published in the latest Journal of Personality, the study was a collaboration with scientists from the Université de Montréal, the Université du Québec à Montreal and McGill University. And, according to Yahoo! News LiveScience, the study “focused on what psychologists call autonomy, the basic need to feel like you’re acting based on your own values and desires, not those of others. Controlling parents chip away at their child’s autonomy, by pushing them into a hobby, the researchers say. So when the kid picks up his clarinet it’s not out of a desire to play music, but due to a sense of obligation or a fear of disappointing his parents.”

The morning show hosts were divided about the results, with some pointing out the benefits of parents pushing kids to stick with things like piano lessons.  As one blogger said (in a post with a title I loved - ”They Say: Leave Those Kids Alone“): ”It’s a tough balance for parents to strike. We want our kids to learn the art of perseverance. We don’t want them to quit simply because they aren’t getting their way. Often pushing them to stick with it just another game or practice allows them the chance to finally ‘get’ how to make that jump shot or master ‘Three Blind Mice.’”

Me? I had a total flashback to when I faced that decision a couple of years ago. I blogged here then about my daughter’s desire to quit piano and got a lot of great feedback from our readers.

Today, our daughter’s only extra-curricular is Girl Scouts, but we do continue to make music accessible to her by providing her with instruments to experiment on in her own play (Santa didn’t bring her the full drum set she asked for this year, but compromised with a much smaller digital drum that’s, expectedly, seen a small amount of use). She is still expressing no real passion for an instrument, but does talk about voice lessons. And, very recently, she’s begun to talk about joining a swim team, which seems like a good fit because she is such a fish in our own backyard pool.

So, as we contemplate these activities, I’ll be heading into them with good advice our readers gave me before, and now also scientific study to help me feel better about not pushing too hard. That’s the sort of balance one of the study’s author’s talks about.

“I’m not telling parents to let their kids do whatever they want without limits,” Mageau said. “The most important message is to focus on the child’s interests and not to impose one’s own on them.”

When I was getting married some of my friends from college joked that it was a sign of the Apocalypse. That’s because all through college I vehemently proclaimed that I would never get married and I’d certainly never have kids.

Yes, I eventually learned that I should never say never.

But even after deciding there was a place for a child in my life, I didn’t immediately feel comfortable in the role of mom.  Her infant years were hard for me - I ran back to work as soon as maternity leave was over. I wanted to be where I knew how to do my job and people could tell me what they needed (as opposed to me trying to guess what all that crying was about).

To some of you I’m sure that sounds harsh, but I really think it’s a myth that all women naturally have some instinct for mothering.  Instead of being proud, I resented when my husband would say I was better at some element of parenting than he was.  It wasn’t because I had any more practice at it than he had (never did the whole babysitting thing and was the baby of the family). If I was better at something it was because I poured over books, magazines and websites to learn how.  Something he could have just as easily done.

Toddler years had their own challenges. Getting a mug with “World’s Greatest Mom” on it was still far from my idea of success; but, things at least got a little better once she was able to verbalize her needs and wants. This may still sound uncaring, but to the contrary, I began to realize during this time that I had a love for my daughter I couldn’t explain. It runs deeper and more differently than anything else I’ve experienced. Maybe I do have some sort of instinct after all - like the one that means you never want to get between a mother bear and her cub.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t often wish for the days when going out didn’t take the advance planning of lining up a babysitter. I still cringed a bit when someone would call me a mommy blogger even though I blog here about issues related to motherhood. But, I also found myself becoming more vocal about support for girls and representation by women - not for advancing myself, but in the hopes of better things for women of her generation.

Then, an interesting thing happened the other day. I was watching the news with my laptop in, well, my lap and I saw a couple of guys I follow on Twitter mention that they were heading to San Francisco where the weatherman had just said it was going to rain.  So, I tweeted to them about packing an umbrella and David Armano replied “you’re such a mom.”

And I didn’t flinch. There was no cringe. No resentment.

Instead, I replied with another “mom” retort: “And eat your vegetables young man!”

I think maybe, seven years into this mommy gig and entering my fifth generation of life, I might be finally becoming comfortable with the whole “mom” label.

Photo compliments of Leandro Queiroz via Creative Commons.

I’m one of those children of the 70s/80s who grew up thinking I should “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan,” and never let my man forget he’s a man. We were supposed to strive to be “Supermoms” who were able to do it all.

And, according to the recent Advertising Age white paper “The New Female Consumer: The Rise of the Real Mom,” most of us do “do it all.” Their research showed that “…women with children still handle the bulk of the household and child-care responsibilities, the so-called ’second shift’ — whether they are working full time, staying at home or something in between.”

This is in an age when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports both parents were employed in 62 percent of the 24.6 million families made up of a married couple with children under 18. And, in the 2006-2007 academic year, the U.S. Department of Education noted women earned a majority of higher-education degrees.

The full report embedded here is filled with many more such statistics, including a 48-year comparison on education, purchasing power, and wages. But, the “real mom” to which its title makes reference is what they are really making a case for in the paper.

They posit that “the second half of this decade has brought a backlash against the mythical Supermom — that hyperactive type-A personality who whips up perfect cookies and perfect children — and an embrace of the likable, more relatable real mom, who doesn’t obsess over the little things.”

The case is made that millennial women (born between 1980 and 1995) are leading this change in attitude. They are apparently not as “conflicted” as my generation — Generation X. While I grew up being told I was equal to men, what I saw was my own mother doing an unequal amount of work to keep our family running - that “second shift” we women are apparently still working.

“[Millennials] grew up with seeing a lot of moms working, being outside the home a lot, and decided ‘Hey, this isn’t what I want,’” Aliza Freud, founder and CEO of SheSpeaks said in the AdAge report. “So they may be at peace more with their not working or working.”

Nearly have of the women surveyed for the report said finding balance between family and career is “a joke” for working women and I will certainly agree with that. The tagline for this blog used to say that it wasn’t about balance, but about juggling.

As one journalist put it: “While no longer striving to be supermoms doing everything for everyone, mothers are looking toward being pragmatic and good enough, and making a real impact in the areas that matter most for them and their children.”

This AdAge report implies that marketers should help empower women to delegate responsibilities to spouses, children and even brands so that they will have “more time to be who they want to be.”

As Carroll Trosclair on Suite101.com rightly points out, “marketers have been helping women delegate work to products, services and brands for decades. But delegating work to husbands and children may be a new and controversial challenge for advertisers.”

Interesting Side Note:
While researching for this post, I came across a blog that mentions one of the ways information was gathered for the whitepaper. Kitchen Table Conversations, “a new user-generated video research service revolutionizing how qualitative research is conducted” was used to gather information on grocery shopping habits. If you’re interested in qualitative research methods, check it out.

A recent headline in Virtual World News certainly caught my eye: “FTC Study Finds ‘Explicit Sexual Content’ in Teen, Kids Virtual Worlds.”

Having written several reviews of kids virtual worlds here, I was at first relieved to not see any of them named in the article. Then, I got nervous when I found three of them listed as part of the survey sample: Build-a-Bear-ville, Handipoints and Pixie Hollow. However, after searching the report, the only mention of them I can find is in the appendix list of the survey sample; so, I’m hoping that is a sign that explicit content was not found in them.

But, to make sure, I dug into the FTC’s Virtual Worlds and Kids: Mapping the Risks - a 92-page report to Congress. All-in-all, I think it is rather balanced.

From a “master list” of 187 virtual worlds, the Commission constructed a sample of 27. Six were deliberatly included because they’d been identified as potentially containing explicit content. These worlds were Gaia, IMVU, There.com, Second Life, Red Light Center, and Kaneva - none of which are targeted at children under 13.

Fourteen of the 27 online virtual worlds in the Commission’s survey were open to children under age 13. Of these 14 virtual worlds, the Commission found at least one instance of explicit content on seven of them. All of that was observed when the Commission’s researchers visited those worlds posing as teen or adult registrants, not when visiting the worlds as children under 13 (with the exception of one world named Bots).
In six of these seven kid virtual worlds, the amount of explicit content observed was considered low.

Only in Stardoll, did the Commission find a moderate amount of explicit content. That’s one world I had thought of reviewing, but wasn’t sure it was right for my seven-year-old. Sounds like I might be wise to wait.

It’s interesting to see that they also note: “Because the Commission’s researchers examined these worlds with the express purpose of uncovering sexually and violently explicit content, it is unlikely that a typical user would stumble upon such content unintentionally.”

Almost all of the explicit content they found in the kid virtual worlds was text-based and was found in chat rooms, message boards, and discussion forums. In Stardoll, almost all of the explicit content observed was in the form of “violently explicit text posted on discussion boards. Again, however, none of the explicit content observed on Stardoll occurred when the Commission’s researchers registered as a child under age 13.47.”

Not surprisingly, the Commission found more explicit content in the online virtual worlds that are supposed to be closed to children under age 13 (“teen- and adult-oriented virtual worlds”). They found a greater concentration of explicit content in worlds that permit teens to register.

“Although some of the teen- and adult-oriented online virtual worlds in which the Commission observed explicit content have taken steps to restrict minors’ access to explicit content, their efforts have not fully succeeded. Virtual world operators can do more to limit youth exposure to explicit content. Given important First Amendment considerations, the Commission supports virtual world operators’ self-regulatory efforts to implement these recommendations.”

Some of the things they are suggesting include:

• better age-screening practices
• segregating users by age
• stronger language filters
• more community moderators, and
• parents and children alike should become better educated about online virtual worlds.

That last one is always the most important. Parents should never totally rely on age-screening mechanisms to keep their kids out of virtual worlds they shouldn’t be in — they’ll always find ways around registration restrictions.

It’s up to us to monitor where our kids are going online, teach them how to behave online, and teach them how to keep themselves safe when we’re not there.

As the Commission put it, “even properly registered children should be taught to make safe and responsible choices when communicating online, and to be cognizant of the risks posed by playing games and congregating in venues that may be designed for older audiences.”

What was the ultimate conclusion of the FTC Commission regarding explicit material in virtual worlds?

“Online virtual worlds provide children and teens with educational, social, and creative opportunities. However, as with other aspects of the Internet, youth may be exposed to explicit content while participating in online virtual worlds. Parents, therefore, should familiarize themselves with the features offered by the online virtual worlds their children visit. For their part, operators should ensure that they have mechanisms in place to limit youth exposure to explicit content in their online virtual worlds.”

I think that sums it up nicely.