THE Talk

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Clint| 2 Comments

Last night, my wife greeted me at the door with the statement, “well, The Girl now knows how babies are made.” Apparently, a good friend of hers at daycare told her all the details last week. Surprisingly, he got most of the details quite right, but there were a few little unanswered questions that my wife had to fill in the blanks on. When they finished talking, there was a pause as my daughter digested the information. After a moment, she had one more question.

“Soooooo, ” she said, pieces falling into place, “you and Dad had to do that TWICE?”

Julia Sweeney has just had “The Talk” with her 8 year old daughter. Best line in this TED Talk – “It’s like putting the waste treatment plant right next to an amusement park.”

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Posted in My Kids and Family

Pole dancing for kids

Posted on August 3, 2010 by Clint| 3 Comments

Seriously. A studio called Tantra Fitness in Vancouver is offering summer classes in pole dancing for kids.

The Canadian company, which operates in Vancouver and Langley, has taught students age nine and up in regular classes, and has gone as young as five years old in private lessons.

Maybe I am wrong here. Maybe the type of pole dancing being taught at Tantra Fitness is rooted more in the ancient Chinese circus tradition of pole dancing. Oh, wait a sec. What did you say the names of those pole dancing classes were? Bellylicious, Sexy Flexy, Pussycat Dawls and Promiscuous Girls?

Apparently, it’s an awesome ab workout. Yeah, well, if I want my 6 year old daughter to have rock hard abs, I’ll pick an activity that isn’t rooted in thousands of years of sexual history, like maybe the monkey bars.

“Children have no [erotic] association with the pole whatsoever,” says Morris, arguing that kids would see the same apparatus at a firehall, playground or circus. “Unless you teach someone how to grind and make reference to taking off your clothing, there’s nothing wrong with it.”

Oh, wait. This is MY issue. I am the one who is making the act of pole dancing sexual, projecting MY opinions and attitudes about the sexual nature of pole dancing onto the activity. Because, you know, the little girls (thank goodness) have no idea that there is anything sexual about dancing around a pole. But doesn’t that fact make this activity even more repulsive? Hey, I have an idea! Let’s teach our little girls to be sexual without them actually realizing they are taking part in an act most of society finds sexual. Nothing like preparing them early on with the necessary skills they will need to understand the hyper-sexualized world they inhabit. I mean, being a kid is already confusing enough, let alone being a girl. Do we need to make it even more confusing for little girls by adding in the complexities and gradient shades of gray involved with sex? Why even go there with 5 and 6 year old girls?

Yep, nothing says wholesome summer fun like pole dancing.

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Posted in Media, Advertising and Pop Culture, Political Parent

Tonight, I am incredibly indebted to the kindness of strangers

Posted on June 7, 2010 by Clint| 8 Comments

I had turned my cell phone ringer off, so it wasn’t until the conference lunch break that I noticed I had a half dozen missed calls waiting for me. When you have kids, and you get 6 calls in the course of a few hours, you get uneasy. I phoned my wife.

“What’s up?”

“The police called me this morning and said there was an incident with G at preschool.”

Immediately my stomach drops, coming to rest on the floor of my pelvis. It is amazing how fast the synapses can fire in less than a second, and how many random scenarios you can play out in your heard before you hear the line after that one. Accident? Hospital? Injury? Anyphylactic reaction of my 3 year old allergic son?

“He’s okay,” said my wife, her voice quivering on the other end of the line. ”The preschool forgot him at the playground.”

“What?” My stomach lurches.

“They went to the playground for a Sportball lesson. While they were there another parent dropped of their kid, and they miscounted before they walked back to the centre. He got left behind in the park.”

She goes into the details. He was playing, looked around and realized he was all alone. Everyone was gone. He started crying. We’ve talked to him about this scenario before – if he gets lost he should look for a Mom with kids and ask for help. So, he does. Crying, he manages to find a Mom and tell her his preschool has left. So the Mom calls 911. Police are on the way. Meanwhile, another Mom in the playground notices the commotion and comes over. She somehow manages to figure out that the preschool G goes to is the same as the one her nephew goes to. Lucky. The police arrive. A phone call is made back to the preschool, and a few minutes later a breathless preschool teacher arrives back in the park. Both she and G are given a ride back to the preschool by the police, who spend some time talking to the staff.

My little guy is okay. By the time we picked him up, the incident was becoming distant. His first words to us when we walked into the preschool playground was “Dad, guess what? Today I climbed a tree!”  This was followed by “…and got to ride in a police car.”

I am so full of mixed emotions about this incident. We have had an incredible relationship with this daycare/preschool for the past 5 years (The Girl has been going there since she was 14 months old) and know the staff to be nothing but competent, caring and committed. We love these people like we do family because they ARE family. Our children spend many hours a week in their care and we know and trust them. It goes without saying that they were as upset by the whole incident as we were. I have no doubt that steps will be taken to ensure this never happens again. Our relationship, and my trust in them, is still solid.

But it’s that brief split second between “there was an incident” and “he is okay” that I can’t seem to shake, and which has shaken me. For it is in that brief split second that you come face to face with your worst fear as a parent. It is a brief second that lasts an eternity and replays in your head long after the moment has passed. The moment when you believe that the worst has happened. I know that everything turned out well in the end, and I should focus on that. But still, it will take some time for the power of that split second emotional burst to fade.

Mostly, however, I am feeling gratitude; gratitude that this did have a happy ending, and immense gratitude to the kind strangers who, upon seeing a child in distress, got involved and helped.

Thank you.

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Posted in My Kids and Family

When do you end the bedtime bath?

Posted on May 1, 2010 by Clint| 5 Comments

As a parenting strategy to help your life go smoother, it’s hard to argue with the tried and true strategy of established routines. One of the routines we have with our kids is the evening bath, which we use as the transition to bedtime.

For my 6 year old daughter, her bedtime routine has consisted of a bath before bed every night (save the very rare occasion) since she was a baby. But lately I have begun to wonder at what age does the bedtime bath stop and can be removed as part of the bedtime routine?

An evening bath does serve another purpose other than acting as the starting point in the bedtime routine, which is, of course, hygiene. But the primary reason we (and I suspect most) parents have an evening bath has more to do with routine than cleanliness, and running a bath each and every night is not exactly an environmentally friendly act.

So, my question is – at what age do you/did you begin phasing out the evening bath as part of the bedtime routine?

Photo: Big Fun by Ernst Moeksi used under Creative Commons license

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Posted in Dad to Dad

Geek Dad: The Book

Posted on April 28, 2010 by Clint| 2 Comments

I was reading the latest issue of Wired magazine (which, as an aside, my 43 year old eyes are finding harder and harder to read each issue as the type size seems to be shrinking to oh-my-god-I-am-an-old-fart-and-need-bifocals size. Yes, I know. My status as an old fart was solidified as soon as I typed “I was reading the latest issue of Wired magazine.” Who the hell reads magazines anymore except for old farts. But I digress.)

Anyhoo, I was reading the latest issue of Wired a couple days ago and saw that the most awesome Geek Dad blog has a book coming out, and some of the projects in Geek Dad: Awesomely Geeky Projects and Activities for Dads and Kids to Share look like tons of fun for Geek Dads/Moms and their kids, like:

See the World From the Sky Satellite stills from Google Maps are fine, but you can outdo them with a Flip. Pack the camera in Styrofoam and tie on a 500-foot spool of kite string and 16 helium-filled balloons. Send it up. On a calm day, you’ll get great bird’s-eye footage of your neighborhood.

Now, I don’t have a Flip, but I do have an old Canon PowerShot kicking around that’ll do video just nicely. So if you happen to drive by my house and it looks like a scene from Up, you’ll know  that my copy of Geek Dad has arrived.

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Posted in Kids and Technology

Calgary School Board gets it right: Our kids need internet access in school

Posted on February 13, 2010 by Clint| 10 Comments

According to the CBC, the Calgary Board of Education is beefing up their wireless networks in order to allow students access to the Internet in school. After reading the comments, it seems I am one of the few who believe that this is a good thing.

I’ll go beyond that statement, actually, to say it makes me feel profoundly sad to read the comments and see so many people think of the Internet as something that is unimportant and a waste of time. That the immediate thought of most is that students will do nothing but abuse the access they are given. Yes, some will. Yes, this move will not be easy and yes, it will require that some things within the school and teaching change. It will be disruptive, but in my opinion, we have no choice and the longer we delay giving students this kind of access in schools, the bigger we fail them.

In 1953, Child psychologist Jean Piaget wrote, “The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.”  We have moved far beyond a world where teaching “the basics” is enough. To not bring this type of access to students in our schools does a grave disservice to our children and their ability to work and live in THEIR world, not our world.

How do we teach students to become critical thinkers in an information age when we shield them from information?

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that web is the greatest educational tool ever created, and to not figure out how to appropriately use it within education is amazingly short sighted. We need to help students figure out how to appropriately use this tool or else we risk abdicating it to the likes of Perez Hilton and mass infotainment. If educators do not stake a claim on the web, it will become exactly the devoid educational environment that those posting negative comments at the CBC site fear.

I am not naive to believe that this will be easy.  Teachers will have to develop new skills. New problems will arise that we need to find solutions for. New methods of teaching developed that exploit the affordances of technology. But as a parent, I will firmly support and actively advocate for the appropriate use of technology in the classroom for my children. And I will also actively support any initiative that helps teachers learn the skills to teach my kids how to appropriately use the web.

To the teachers who are pushing for access to technology in the classroom and running into barriers (and I work on the periphery of the K-12 education system and know many of you do run into resistance), keep up the fight. I am with you. And if you are a teacher who cannot understand or see the potentials of the web – who believes that the Internet is a useless time waster full of nothing but LOL and OMG, please consider retiring and opening up a space for teachers who want to teach my kids to live in THEIR world, not yours.

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Posted in Education, Kids and Technology

Tagged , , ,

7 Anti-princess Princess Books

Posted on January 15, 2010 by Clint| 6 Comments

I am not sure if The Girl is outgrowing her princess phase, but it certainly hasn’t been the focus of her attention in the past little while like it was at one time. That said, they are hard to ignore and Princesses still pop up from time to time. Like Patricia Coppard, we also try to expose The Girl to Princesses who don’t fit into the standard Princess stereotype. But it isn’t easy.

I once went to the public library with my daughter looking for anti-Princess Princess books – the kind with strong female characters who don’t end up living the Prince’s life at the end. I asked the librarian if she could recommend something that was about Princesses, but not the Disney kind. She could not recommend a single book. Even after I prompted her with a “something along the lines of The Paper Bag Princess, perhaps?” she still could not think of a book to recommend. So, after searching around the library ourselves, we finally found The Gypsy Princess about a young gypsy girl named Cinnamon who longs to live a Princess life until she actually gets to and finds it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Man, I wish I had Patricia’s list of recommended books that day because it looks like there are some good ones. So, if you are looking for a few anti-princess princess books, here are a few that she recommends, with a few of mine tossed in.

  1. The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munch
  2. The Gypsy Princess by Poebe Gilman
  3. Princess Smartypants by Babette Cole
  4. Sleeping Bobby by Will and Mary Pope Osborne
  5. The Princess and the Packet of Frozen Peas by Tony Wilson (Patricia’s personal favourite)
  6. Princesses Are Not Quitters by Kate Lum
  7. Princess Pigsty by Cornelia Funke.

Care to add to the list? What is your favorite non-princess princess book?

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Posted in Media, Advertising and Pop Culture, My Kids and Family

The lie I am happy to tell my kids

Posted on December 19, 2009 by Clint| 3 Comments

When you are 6 and 3, there are a few truths. White milk tastes better in a pink cup. Peas can never touch the potatoes. And on Christmas Eve, a fat guy in a red suit will somehow squeeze down the chimney and leave presents under the tree.

If there is one thing my kids believe in with absolute conviction is that something magical will happen on Christmas Eve. There is not even an inkling of doubt that what happens 6 days from now will not be real. The fact that Santa couldn’t be real is inconceivable – a possibility that has never entered their consciousness.

For weeks now, the talk around our house has been of Christmas. Of the family and friends we have coming, of the meals we will prepare, of the parties we will be going to. All of this is adding to their excitement level. They are vibrating with anticipation.

When The Girl was born my wife and I struggled with the mythology of the season. Is it okay to lie to your kids? Because, window dress it all you like, it is a lie.

It’s a struggle Chad at Vancouver Parent has been blogging about in an  excellent series of articles which has provoked tons of response, including some supposedly from kids who stumbled across his article in Google and had their world shattered. Chad, I don’t think you need to lose sleep over this one. It’s an inevitable fact that they would have found out anyway.

In the end, our decision was that childhood is a place where fairies and magic, bunnies that leave chocolate eggs, and fat guys who bring toys exist. In the culture we have grown up in, this mythology is part of of what makes childhood special and unique. The absolute conviction that this stuff is real is a big part of “the magic”.

In my twenties I spent many years working in commercial radio. During that time I grew to despise Christmas. Christmas just meant I had to work twice as hard selling people stuff. I spent countless hours locked in a voiceover studio pumping out commercial after commercial. My on location work tripled, and  Christmas Eve was often spent on location at various businesses around town trying to do a last minute pitch jobs on sweaters and stereo equipment, only to pick up the pitch on Boxing Day. By the time I hit 30, I was done with Christmas, and with commercial radio.

Since then Christmas has slowly became a more meaningful time of year. But it hasn’t been until this year that I have truly felt that mythical “magic” of the season. It feels like when I was a kid, and I attribute this to the fact that my kids are entering their peak Christmas years. They get it, and their excitement is infectious. I find that I am anxiously looking forward to a 6am wake up call to witness the magic unfold.

I am mindful that this will only last for a few years. The Girl is smart. She asks questions. And this years unwavering belief could become shadowed next as she spends more time with peers and in school with bigger kids. This may be the only year where they both live with the absolute reality that magic still exists. And I am going to soak it up.

As tough as the lifegrind sometimes seems to be, I know that when I am a drooling old fart these are the days that I will look back on as the best days of my life. And part of that is tied to the fact that I am feeding off the excitement of my kids. They are making this a magical time of the year for me, too. I am having so much fun with them as we all get swept up.

You see, in the end, it is really all about me. Selfish old me. I tell them the lie because I want them to believe in the magic because their belief is MY magic. It ‘s a magic that weaves an intoxicating spell over me and sweeps me up in tides of gushing sentimentalism.

The lie is not a lie we parents tell our kids, it’s a lie parents tell to ourselves because we want to believe. We want these moments to be pure and sparkling and live long in our memories. The lie becomes a device – an excuse we use to generate the energy and the excitement that heightens all senses, which helps to indelibly burn these shared family moments into our memories for years.

This year, for the first time since I believed the lie myself, I do believe in the magic of Christmas because I am living it with my kids. And that is why I am happy I told the lie.


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Posted in Life as Dad, My Kids and Family

A post for soon to be new Dads

Posted on December 4, 2009 by Clint| 1 Comment

Jim over at Sweet Juniper has created one of those wonderful posts that somehow manages to encapsulate exactly what being a Dad is.  A funny, sweet, sad, frustrating, and intimately poignant snapshot of a day in the life of one Dad.

I can especially relate to the moment he shares with his daughter who, after throwing up on his laptop battling a norovirus, reacts like I could imagine mine doing. Just when you think you know what you are being called on to do as a parent (in this case, make your kid comfortable while they battle a bug), parenthood throws you a small curveball and you realize that you are being called upon to do something else entirely.

I go into my daughter’s room to kiss her goodnight and find her sweating under blankets. Her best friend has lately found other kids he’d rather play with at school, and in her sleepy state that’s the first thing on her mind. Through her dream haze she says to me, “It’s good that he wouldn’t play with me today; I might have made him sick.” Here I’ve been worried I upset her with my reaction to what happened, but heavier things weigh on her tiny heart.

“I just want you to know that I love you, and that my computer isn’t broken after all.”

“Okay, Pops.”

“And don’t you worry about him. He doesn’t know how much fun he’s missing.”

A few lines later, musing about his angry reaction to losing his laptop, he says;

But how could you be mad at her? You might as well be mad at the wind.

Later on, an event happens that puts losing your laptop to a kid vomiting on it into perspective, and presents another reality of what parents are called upon to deal with, in this case it is Jim’s Mother-in-Law. Here’s hoping the follow-up post has some good news with regards to that situation.

This is wonderful writing, and a post that every soon to be Dad should read.

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Posted in A Dad's Role, Dad to Dad, Life as Dad

Watch It’s a Wonderful Life for free online

Posted on December 3, 2009 by Clint| Comments Off

Update December 12, 2009. looks like the video has been pulled.

Like most people there are certain movies that I watch every year during the holiday season. A Christmas Story, Scrooged, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and It’s a Wonderful Life.

It’s a Wonderful Life, in particular, seems to have a real cultural relevance today. Not only are the themes of the movie timeless (the importance of community and the power of one), but the setting for the movie seems so contemporary considering the events of the past year. While we in Canada have been somewhat shielded by the financial turmoil south of the border, the past years financial uncertainties have certainly rippled across the border. Considering the movie is well over 60 years old, the story of corporate greed, failed banks and financial institutions, and foreclosed homes is the stuff that we are, sadly, read about everyday.

The entire movie is available online or watch it below.

via Open Culture’s list of movies you can watch for free online.

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Posted in Media, Advertising and Pop Culture

What should I ask my kids teacher?

Posted on November 23, 2009 by Clint| 4 Comments

I have my first parent teacher night later this week with my daughter’s kindergarten teacher and am looking for some input (particularly from any teachers who may read this) as to what makes a good parent teacher interview?

This won’t be the first time we have met the teacher. Both my wife and I have gone on a few field trips with the class, and have volunteered in the classroom so we already have a relationship with her. But this will be the first  “formal” evaluation where we can sit down for 15 minutes and talk specifically about The Girl and her learning.

So, as a teacher, what do you hope will happen in those 15 minutes? What are you going to try to get across and what do you like to see a parent ask when they are sitting across the desk from you during the interview? And for parents who have done this a few times, what do you think makes a good parent teacher interview?

Image: v2.194: September 10th (Good Day for Mommies) by Phony Nickle. Used under CC license.

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Posted in Education

Hey YouTube – Dads might find it useful, too

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Clint| 3 Comments

One thing that has remained consistent in the 6 years I have been writing this blog is that society still views us Dads as secondary parents. Case in point, the new YouTube channel aimed at parents (or so their blog post says it is). Great idea to aggregate the best parenting videos on YouTube into a single collection. Very useful for parents. So, then why call the channel “For Moms”? Why not call the channel “For Parents”?

I know, it seems like such a little thing, but again and again these types of semantics are important as they reflect the underlying belief that Moms are the only ones in the family that might be interested in information about parenting. In other words, Dads don’t care.

ARGGGGHHHHHHH.

Look, YouTube, I know it’s not intentional to shut out Dads like this. You might not have even thought about the title in these terms since it is just an accepted norm in our society that Moms are the go to person in the family when it comes to parenting. But I find it hard to believe that not a single person sitting around the table at YouTube talking about this channel did not see the title as being exclusionary to Dads? I mean, YouTube must have at least one Dad on their staff working on this stuff who might have stood up and said, “hey, wait a sec – why not me?”

And while I am ranting, why do you need to refer to your new parenting channel as a “survival guide”. Yeah, parenting is hard work and I realize you are trying to be fun and playful, but to equate parenting with being in “survival” mode? C’mon, surely we can do better as parents than simply hunker down into “survival mode” for 20 odd (and yes, at times it is really odd) years.

Sigh. The battle continues….


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Posted in Media, Advertising and Pop Culture, The Daddy Fight

Dad news that caught my eye this week (via Twitter)

Posted on November 13, 2009 by Clint| Comments Off

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Posted in Life as Dad

Dad news that caught my eye this week (via Twitter)

Posted on November 6, 2009 by Clint| 1 Comment

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Posted in Life as Dad

Dad news that caught my eye this week (via Twitter)

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Clint| 4 Comments

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Posted in Life as Dad