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.”

“Balance is bullshit.”

I first heard that epiphany at a women’s conference last fall. Since the Winter Olympics commences for the XXI time on the stage of

Gravity wins every time.

Vancouver in less than 72 hours, I’m sharing it here today.

The connection, you ask? As usual, figure skating events will be among the most watched. Thousands of breathless spectators and a few nitpicky commentators will scrutinize the skaters – especially the women — as they careen, leap and twirl on their millimeter-thin blades over polished frozen water, just waiting for the moment when someone’s barely-skirted butt bites the ice. A collective “oooh” will reverberate around the rink. Commentators will tsk. Judges will downgrade.

Me at home? Every tumble, every oooh, I’ll be cheering at the live example of the pure truth in those three little words: Balance is bullshit.

For years, I bought the BS on balance. Mental health, serenity, contentment – it was just a matter of achieving the right balance. It led to constant self-chatter: “Work’s becoming too consuming. Scale back there, amp up quality time with the kids. OK, balanced work and home life. Wait, what about time for you? Schedule a girls’ night out. OK, now I’ve got it. Oops, exercise has fallen off the wagon. ow Ho

“How about yoga class every other Wednesday? No, the car needs new tires, we really can’t afford it. But what about balance? What price can you put on your mental health? Maybe I can just go to bed earlier. Catch up on my rest. Hey, who’s that strange guy in my bed? Uh-oh, better plan a date night.”

And on and on and on. Another truism: It’s always something - especially for women and even more especially for mothers - that knocks us off balance. Yet we keep chasing the illusion. Achieving balance becomes yet another to-do, not to mention another source of guilt and blame. “It’s my own fault friends are neglected/I bought Valentines for the kids’ school party instead of making them/the home business languishes/fill in the blank…because my life isn’t balanced.”

So to hear that BS busted was empowering, to say the least. It made me recall my last yoga class (some time ago, what with the need

Tree pose

for new tires and all.) Yoga consists of the practice of sets of poses – standing poses, sitting poses, inverted poses, balance poses. According to my instructor, balance poses – another term whose brevity belies the enormity of its truth; what is balance if not a pose? – actually become more difficult later in the day. It’s easier to hold a tree or a flying eagle in the morning than it is in the afternoon, and easier in the afternoon than the evening. I see this reflected in the flow of women’s lives, too. When we’re young, there’s less to balance and it’s easier. As we grow older and take on more commitments, it gets harder. You’d think that’s when we’d ease up on ourselves.

Come Friday’s opening ceremonies, that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be hopping around my living room, cheerfully trying to regain my tree pose, and cheering when gravity inflicts the inevitable in Vancouver.

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.

Back in August, I saw a note on Twitter Moms about the opportunity to review a new book titled “The BlackBerry Diaries: Adventures in Modern Motherhood.”

Being a BlackBerry-toting mom myself, it sounded like a great opportunity to read something fun - for free - and, who can resist free? (Yes, FTC, I got a free copy of the book to review in this blog.)

The humor book is written like a blog, complete with tags at the end of each short, dated entry. This style turned out to be both a good thing and a bad thing for me. It’s good because the brief entries let you easily pop in and out of the book (you know, like when you have to step away to deal with something that just came in on your BlackBerry). But, it’s also bad because it can be a little too easy to set it aside.

I received my copy in early September and have yet to finish it. But, rather than wait any longer, I figured I should go ahead and earn my free book by writing about it now.

The premise of the book is that toddlers and technology are not so different. “If they’re quiet, you’re constantly checking them to make sure everything is okay. If they’re loud and interrrupting, you just want them to shut up and go away. When they do, the cycle starts all over again.”

There were some observations to which I could relate: “… many BB-using employees will burn out quicker and resign faster as they continue to jam two years’ worth of work into seven and a half months.” But, others that I could not: “The bottom line is this: children and BBSPs [one of the author's acronyms for BlackBerry Smartphone] are all about ownership, one upmanship and petty jealousies.”

And, according to an article in CIO, the author says “she’s sharing lessons learned from her experience using a BlackBerry over the past year to enhance her and her childrens’ lives;” and, quite frankly, I didn’t see any of that in the book. Tips like don’t share your BlackBerry with someone or theyll see your BrickBreaker score, don’t use your BlackBerry at fondue parties and BlackBerries are good for keeping up with neighborhood gossip, yes. But, life enhancements? I’m afraid not.

It’s a nice, light, sometimes funny read; but, maybe because my girl is no longer a toddler or maybe because I’ve added an iPhone (personal) to my BlackBerry (work), I just never could really get into it. Not every book has to be a page-turner, I guess. But, since this one didn’t turn out to be for me, it remains unfinished. And apparently, I’m not the only one who hasn’t turned all its pages.

If anyone out there made it to the end and feels I missed something, please let me know!

Nod your head if three or more of the following apply to you:

• College graduate
• Employed
• Half of a couple
• Mortgage holder
• Parent

Nod again if, despite acquiring all these trappings of adulthood, you still

There's no fiddlin' with tradition.

don’t quite feel grown up.

To me, if often seems like the true benchmarks of our lives occur unexpectedly. You add up the sum of the parts above, and it equals an adult. But the truth of the matter really crystallizes in specific, isolated moments.

Take parenthood, for instance. While I remember the births of both my children in vivid detail, neither was attended by the blend of awe, fear, humility and hope that parenthood was reported to inspire.

But certain mundane moments conferred precisely that ton-of-bricks mix. Like when we moved our first child from his high chair to a booster seat at the table. Wham. Seeing our then almost two-year-old child right there at the table with us hit me square in the gut. In that moment, I got it. We were a family.

I recalled that moment this week as I sized up that table, wondering about squeezing 11 people around it. Another Adult Moment is in the offing. This Thanksgiving, at age 40, for the first time in my life, I won’t be eating my mom’s turkey.

Forty years is a long time to stick with a tradition, even a holiday one. I have celebrated away from my mom’s table. In the early 90s, when I worked as a newspaper reporter in other states and never got the Friday after off, my family came to me. But Mom always toted the turkey along, too.

My brother got married in 1998, and five years later, I followed. Traditions often shift as family members do. But ours endured. Neither of our spouses had a family Thanksgiving tradition. Since my mom lives almost exactly halfway between us, her place is a sensible and equitable destination.

In 2002 my father’s death further cemented the status quo. We packed up first one kid, then two, then three – now five kids between my family and my brother’s – and continued to head over the river and through the woods so Mom wouldn’t be alone on Thanksgiving.

Not this year, though. My brother’s family decided to stay home first. Meanwhile, my snowbird in-laws are delaying this year’s departure. It’s the first chance we’ve had to spend a major holiday with them, so we decided to stay put, too. My mom – who’s indicated that, after 40 years in a row, she’s not too sorry to skip cooking – will head to her sister’s.

I’m excited about a new tradition. It’s probably overdue. Yet at the same time, it conjures up my adult imposter anxieties. There’s no way 11 people will fit around that table. We don’t have a turkey roasting pan. The under-15 set that will comprise half the guests will likely turn up their noses at the traditional menu, making us wonder why we’re bothering.

Yet sometime early Thanksgiving evening, maybe when we’re cleaning up, I expect another gut-level whammo. One down. Thirty-nine to go.

Image credit: Hale Centre Theatre