If you’ve seen the movie Juno then you’re probably familiar with the music of Kimya Dawson. She is 1/2 of The Moldy Peaches (along with Adam Green) who contributed a couple of memorable tracks to the CD. We’ll, Kimya is a Mom and has a kids CD coming out soon. I’m not sure if it is called Alphabutt, but this is one of the songs that will be on it. I’m sure The Girl will be all over this like white on rice.
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Posted in Media, Advertising and Pop Culture
Tagged alphabutt, kids music, Kimya Dawson
In case you missed the excellent PBS Frontline documentary Growing Up Online that aired a few weeks back, PBS has put the entire documentary online. If you have kids, especially if you have kids that are spending time online, you should check this documentary out.
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Posted in Kids and Technology, Media, Advertising and Pop Culture
The Girl is now 4 and interested in all things video screen. If it has a screen, she wants to be there. Small battles have been erupting over screen time in our house. Not huge tantrum issues, but whenever it is time to turn off the tv, The Girl begins negotiating harder than a John Grisham lawyer.
The computer is not quite as bad. She does enjoy some of the activities at the CBC Kids site and the occasional stop at the Pingu website. But other than that her favorite activity on the computer is watching home videos and our photo slideshows. But I know the day is coming. The world of online games, social networking and questionable media role models is just around the corner.
Common Sense media has just posted a basic little media literacy list called Six Ways to Be a Media-Savvy Parent. The theme of the list is a good one. Rather than advice on how to isolate and monitor our kids, the list focuses on helping parents become educated and active participants in our kids media lives. We can’t turn it off, so we might as well educate ourselves and try to be involved.
At the very least, you might be able to leverage some of the tips into a convincing argument that your family really needs a personal digital recorder and a new Wii. Really, it’s for the kids.
A bunch of 7-9 year olds in North Carolina were recently given the task of “designing” the perfect laptop. As someone who works in educational technology I’m finding some of the drawings these kids came up with quite interesting and more than a tad disconcerting.
Looking at these designs, it seems that the commercial and pop culture side of the web is hands down beating anything educational for these kids. To these kids, the web is a place where you buy things, play games, catch up on pop culture news and connect with friends.
Not surprisingly, almost every kid has a Games button, but what I find most fascinating is how attuned these 7-9 year olds are to consumer culture, marketing and pop culture. There are designs with buttons labeled “Buy”, “Shop” and “Order”, reflecting the fact that, to these kids buying things online is a perfectly natural extension of going online. Compare that to 10-15 years ago when e-commerce was still met with skepticism by many. To these Millennial, it is just part of their everyday life.
There are also buttons rife with pop culture references, like Webkniz and Barbie.com, and lots of gadget buttons. iPod, cell phone, video camera buttons, reflecting the ubiquity of electronic devices in kids lives. I’m sure it has been stated by someone somewhere, but it seems self evident that their generation will be the most documented in history.
I’m disheartened to find a lack of buttons to things like “dinosaurs” or buttons labeled National Geographic Kids or NASA Kids. It’s sad to think that well done information sites aimed at kids are losing out to Webkinz and Barbie. But I suppose if we had the same exercise with College level students we would probably see more Facebook and YouTube than their college library buttons.
One kid, bless ‘em, did include a magical button that I am sure every parent would occasionally like to have on their keyboard – “babysitter”.
You can see some of the drawings these kids did at The Morning News site. If you want to read the original blog post (no photos, but more info on the laptop club), parent.thesis family blogger Amy Tiemann had the original post on CNet.
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Posted in Kids and Technology, Media, Advertising and Pop Culture
Tagged advertising, commercial
We all know what comes tumbling out of a kids mouth is gut busting. But what is often just as funny is the stuff that comes tumbling out of OUR mouths in response to what our kids are doing. That is the premise of Only a Parent, a website where you can submit those crazy things that we all hear ourselves saying, but if we really stop and think about it, sound absolutely ridiculous. The owner of the site then creates a custom illustration for the quote, giving all of us parents a fine chuckle.
The site relies on submissions from parents, so if you have ever heard yourself saying something that doesn’t sound quite right when removed from the context you said it in, send ‘er in.
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Posted in Media, Advertising and Pop Culture, Silly and Fun
Some of you may know that I am a huge fan of the English soccer club Arsenal. One of their rising young stars is a kid named Theo Walcott. He’s 18 years old and has just lent his name to a major breastfeeding awareness campaign in the UK.
I’m not sure I know many professional athletes, let alone 18 year old guys, who are even aware that breasts have a function, so major kudos to Theo for stepping up and becoming an advocate for breastfeeding. True, he is getting a bit of media coaching from his midwife Mom, but still a big deal for someone like Theo to take this on. he realizes it isn’t without risks.
He seems unconcerned (or perhaps unaware) about the potentially lethal dressing-room combination of being baby-faced and advocating mother’s milk. “I know I’ll get the mickey taken out of me, but that’s always happening anyway. What can I say? It’s the right thing to do. It’s about healthy eating, getting healthy bones, right from the start of life, and men need to support their wives in that. That’s what I’ll be doing with my kids.”
The Breastfeeding Manifesto Walcott is promoting has been produced by a coalition of 39 organisations, including the Royal Society of Paediatrics and Child Health and the Royal College of Midwives. It not only calls for health-care professionals to be fully trained to support mothers with breastfeeding but also for government support for breastfeeding in public.
Posted in All The Rest, Media, Advertising and Pop Culture
Tagged arsenal, breastfeeding, theo walcott
Got this in my inbox a couple days ago. Thought I would throw it out here in case one of you might be interested.
Hi:
I am a Senior Writer for MONEY magazine, and I am looking for a single father (or one with primary custody) to profile. If you have any ideas, feel free to call me or shoot me an e-mail. I’d be most grateful.
Sincerely,
Josh Hyatt
You can contact Josh at josh_hyatt@moneymail.com or phone 617-954-9408.
Wow. I’ve never been hip before. But because I have a dick AND change diapers, I guess I can consider myself hip now. At least according to CBS. This morning they aired one of the fluffiest, vacuous, pieces about being a Dad that I have witnessed in a long time.
Never mind that they started the freakin piece with a clip from Mr. Mom, but the whole piece was so focused on the importance of having the right diaper bag (not all pink and flowery) that it makes dads look like they are about as deep as a super model.
And what was that sly comment by the reporter? Did she actual infer that Moms these days are tricking men into being involved parents by buying their husbands the right kind of diaper bag? How bloody patronizing is that? Like having a bad diaper bag is a reason for men to avoid being a parent.
Is it just me, or is the entire world of parenting nothing more than about being “cool”, “hip” and having the right products? Why does it seem like kids are the latest fashion accessory? And why am I made to feel so inadequate because I have the wrong make, model and brand of baby stroller? Oh wait. I forgot. It’s the role of advertising to make me feel inadequate because I don’t have the hippest brand owned by all the cool kids.
But mostly, why is it such a damn surprise to people in the media that men can change diapers? Seriously. Can’t we just accept that we are dads and we change diapers. Hell, some of us even cook and wash dishes! Whoa, stop the presses!
And while we are at it, can we please, please banish the word hip from our lexicon.
It’s big business vs. academia as the Walt Disney Co. is puffing up for a fight with the University of Washington over their recent report that watching TV, and specifically watching Baby Einstein, might be bad for infants.
Disney, the parent company of Baby Einstein, is demanding the University of Washington retract it’s press release regarding the study they released on videos for infants. Disney calls the release “misleading, irresponsible and derogatory.”
Nice to see the University is standing behind their research. UW President Mark Emmert said:
“First of all, I made clear that we supported and stood behind our faculty’s research. It was research that was well-conducted and published in one of the most important” pediatrics journals.”
I hope that they are able to maintain their support of the research and the report with the full brunt of Disney lawyers breathing down their necks.
In a recent State of the Union address, US President George Bush heaped praise on Julie Aigner-Clark, founder of Baby Einstein saying that she is a “generous social entrepreneur” and “represents the great enterprising spirit of America.”
What an endorsement. And from an authority no higher than President of the United States of America. I can only imagine that sales of Baby Einstein products are increasing as we speak.
I’m in complete agreement with the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood when they say that:
The President claimed that Ms. Aigner-Clark “represents the great enterprising spirit of America.†We respectfully disagree. We don’t believe that preying on parents’ concerns about their children’s well-being; deceiving customers about a product’s benefits; or exploiting our youngest and most vulnerable children should have any role in the American marketplace.
As parents, we are kept in a constant state of fear about how we raise our kids. Advertising and marketing do a phenomenal job at making us feel that, if we don’t use (insert a product here), our children may somehow be in danger, miss out or be left behind.
Well, today there is some new research that may have the U.S. President rethinking the praise he heaped on Aigner-Clark. Okay, okay…I doubt this President rethinks anything he says, but I digress. Apparently “Baby Einstein” is doing more harm than good and can actually delay language development in toddlers.
Time magazine recently published a story about the findings of research conducted by Frederick Zimmerman and Dr. Dimitri Christakis at the University of Washington.
…the research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form. “The more videos they watched, the fewer words they knew,” says Christakis. “These babies scored about 10% lower on language skills than infants who had not watched these videos.”
So, how can you actually increase your child’s vocabulary and language skills when they are infants? The authors of the study suggest reading to them as children who are read to daily show a slight increase in language skills.
Dadventure and fellow Dad blogger Vancouver Dad were featured in an article about Dad bloggers in the Vancouver Province over the weekend.
The reporter, Matthew Ramsey, contacted me last week about the story. One of the things that he told me that was new information to me was the new Stats Can figures that show the number of Canadian fathers taking leaves from work to spend time with their kids has increased from 38 per cent in 2001 to 55 per cent in 2006. As Vancouver Dad points out in his post about it:
But the dads don’t stay home for nearly as long. Two-thirds of fathers returned to work within a month of the arrival of the child. It’s no wonder. While mothers usually took formal maternity leave, the dads tended to use vacation time or unpaid leave rather than paid parental leave.
One thing I am noticing with my circle of friends is the number of parents who are splitting their parental leave benefits. The federal government allows for up to 35 weeks of parental leave for either parent, and I know a few parents who are splitting this time between both parents. Dads may take the final 8-12 weeks and Mom may re-enter the workforce a few months sooner.
It’s still far from the ideal (as outlined in the Ministerial Advisory Committee on the Government of Canada’s Child Care Spaces Initiative released in the spring) where both parents could have equal lengths of time off in the first years of their children’s life, but it is a start. And is certainly is a lot better than prior to 2001 when the parental leave benefits were introduced.
The Onion rocks. And now that they have added video, they’ve turned up the volume to 11.
Gap Unveils New ‘For Kids By Kids’ Clothing Line
Got an email from Heather Sherman, a producer for CTV. Heather is working on a series on dads and is looking for some dads to talk to. Specifically, they are looking for stay at home dads, ideally with twins or triplets.
Not many more details than that, but I’ve emailed Heather and said she can flesh out a few more details in the comment section here, so hopefully she will post a few more specifics about what they are doing here.
If you are interested, you can contact Heather at CTV. Her phone number is (416) 332 7483 and email hsherman at ctv.ca.
2 nights ago, I put The Girl to bed at 8 and, as is sometimes the case, I fell asleep beside her. I woke up in her room 3 hours later, tried to go down to my bedroom and fall back asleep.
No luck. I was wide awake.
After tossing and turning for an hour, I grabbed my pillow, hopped down to the living room couch, and flicked on the TV just in time to catch the start of that family friendly flick Scarface
Sweet.
I made it to the chainsaw scene before I was sawing zzzzz’s on the couch.
Next thing I know, I hear a very groggy voice saying “Daddy?” I open my eyes to see the Girl standing in the living room, just as Tony Montana is cutting to the chase and introducing his “little friend” to the entire Columbian drug cartel. There is my girl, my innocent precious 3 year old who we have been shielding from the nastiness of the world, catching Tony Montana in full over the top ultra-violence glory, mowing down Colombians, screaming “Fug you mang. FUG YOU!” at the top of his lungs over and over again. Blood squirting, bullets flying. General mayhem.
I scramble for the remote sitting on the coffee table and manage to turn off the tv before The Girl really clues in to what is happening on screen. I get, up, walk her back up to her bedroom and tuck her in. A few minutes later she is fast asleep, and I am left back awake, wondering what kind of psychological damage might have just done to my 3 year old. It keeps me awake. I can’t get back to sleep. It’s 3 am.
Hmmmm, I wonder what’s on tv?
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Posted in Media, Advertising and Pop Culture, My Kids and Family, Silly and Fun
Tagged Silly
Man, someone please tell me this is a really bad joke. From CommonSense Media.
The media is buzzing about the new season of The Simple Life in which scary skinny rich girls Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton take on the role of camp counselor, including counseling kids at a fat camp (or as E! prefers to call it, a weight loss/ fitness camp).
Seriously, this program idea is about as good as the one from last year where the Olsen Twins pitched a show about healthy eating.
You can just hear the inspiring and helpful advice coming from Ritchie, with her history of eating disorders, and Hilton, who once paraded around in a commercial in a swimsuit and a 50 pound hamburger.
“Like, you guys are so, like, fat.”
“Don’t you know people like us make fun of you.”
“Cause you’re fat and no one likes fat people.”
“Maybe you should, like, try sticking a finger down your throat.”
“Or drugs. Because then you wouldn’t be fat.”
“But we would still make fun of you.”
I know I should really have something much more intelligent and constructive to say here to add to the public discourse about this idiotic, and absurdly cruel, concept. But reading this and I have suddenly regressed back to being a fat little 8 year old kid with people poking me in the belly and laughing. I found that experience utterly humiliating and can’t imagine how horrific it might be for a kid to have their belly poked by a couple of uber Queen Bees
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Posted in Media, Advertising and Pop Culture
Tagged advertising, kids health, nichole ritchie, paris hilton, simple life
I’m a 45 year old Father of two great kids: an 8 year old girl I call “The Girl” and a 5 year old boy called “The Boy”. The names are changed to protect the innocent – they can choose to reveal themselves when the time is right – probably in 20 years with their therapist when the contents of this blog will be used against me :)
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