As we careen towards the finish line in this tumultuous electoral season, President Obama is asking voters to renew his contract as a father figure. And with his new, 11th-hour message that this election is all about “trust,”I think the father-thing is going to resonate.

Without going all Carl Jung on you, presidential campaigns are often about archetypes. John McCain as warrior.  Paul Ryan as super-hero. Joe Biden as the loyal friend.

In 2008, with the whole “hope and change” narrative – not to mention his youthful good looks and energy – Obama was situated somewhere between Jesus Christ and Rock Star in our collective unconscious. But now look at him. After four sobering years of economic crisis and an Arab Spring that just won’t quit, that increasingly-visible graying of the hair above his ears is symbolic. The President has aged, matured, and  – like the rest of us parents – seems both wiser and wearier as a result.

It’s evident in the way that he speaks to us. As I’ve watch the presidential debates with my own kids, I’ve been struck by how parental he sounds. Particularly in the third and final debate, where the president could barely mask his disdain for Mitt Romney’s less-than-up-to-date grasp of our military, many pundits – including my colleague, Melinda Henneberger – saw his tone as patronizing, and wondered whether it wouldn’t alienate undecided women voters in particular.

Read the rest of this post at The Washington Post’s She The People blog…

Image: Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign by namakota das via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

As a parent, it’s sometimes difficult to know which of life’s hard knocks are appropriate for children to know about and when it’s time to introduce them.

I myself came under considerable criticism a few years back when I spoke to my then five year-old daughter about the Holocaust. And I’ve raised more than a few eyebrows (including two of my own) for letting my son read the entire Game of Thrones series when he was ten. (If you want a quick primer on sex, violence and everything short of videotape, do give those books a go…)

But one decision I have not regretted was encouraging our children – now 8 and 11 respectively – to watch the Seven Up! Series with me and my husband.

If you’ve never seen Seven Up!, drop whatever you’re doing right now and go rent it at the library/netflix/love film. You will not be disappointed. Seven Up! began as a documentary about childhood in the class-torn Britain of the 1960s, centered around the famous Jesuit aphorism: “Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man .” The Director, Michael Apted (an assistant on the first film), interviewed 14 seven year-olds from strikingly different backgrounds in England and traced their evolution, the hypothesis being that knowing them at seven would give us insight into the “man” (woman) in adulthood. He then went on to make a new film every seven years, the most recent installment  being 56 up!

Across the films you are privy to the remarkable dreams of childhood, the dashed hopes of adulthood, along with the inevitable personal crises, marital difficulties, and economic challenges that invariably accompany the process of growing up.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Sure, there are some pretty depressing stories in here – including one bright-eyed youngster who proudly announces that he’d like to grow up to become an astronaut but ends up homeless and mentally unstable. But there are also real rays of hope: kids who look like they’ll fall into drugs and crime but don’t, tough women who really enjoy their lives despite not having a lot of money, and poor little rich girls who look like they’re destined to remain lonely and miserable but somehow manage to pull it together and lead a happy family life.

My husband and I wanted our kids to see these films because as much as they shine a spot light on some of the gritty truths of adulthood, equally they teach kids that everything isn’t pre-determined at birth, that happiness isn’t just about having money, and perhaps most importantly of all, that life can be full of surprises-some awful and unfortunate, yes, but some exhilarating and inspiring.

Sure, I’d love to shield my kids from evil and sorrow. But they will confront them. And I want them to be ready.

How about you? What books/plays/music/films have you shown your kids that offered a glimpse into the realities of being a grown up?

Image: OB/FM 12 by Slinky789 via Flickr under a Creative Commons license

I’m so excited.

Today, I’m being featured over on Café Mom’s The Stir, in their month-long Mother’s Day tribute to bloggers they love.

I’ve long been a fan of The Stir, a great parenting blog that mixes serious parenting tips with a lot of humor.

They are featuring a post I wrote on RealDelia a couple of years back, about how we talk to our kids about evil in the world.

Here’s the beginning of the post. Please be sure to head on over to The Stir to read the rest.

Enjoy!

*****

My daughter came home from school yesterday and told me that her best friend had a “hate list.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a list of all the people in the world that she hates.”

“Don’t make one yourself,” I said quickly. “That’s not nice.”

“Yeah, but I only have one person on it,” she responded.

“I don’t care. You’ll hurt someone’s feelings.”

She looked up at me, wide-eyed. “But it’s Hitler.”

Read the rest of this post at The Stir…

Image: Like it or hate it, or maybe it’s ok by emotionaltoothpaste via Flickr under a Creative Commons License

It’s been exactly two weeks since the dreaded “Mommy Wars” re-exploded into our collective lexicon. Since then — courtesy of figures as disparate as First Lady-hopeful Ann Romney and French feminist Elisabeth Badinter— we’ve been pitting stay-at-home-moms against working moms in an inexorable, intractable struggle.

I’m completely on board with all those who think that this faux cat-fight sets up a false dichotomy within the female voting block that’s neither productive nor accurate. As far as I’m concerned, the real wars aren’t the ones that go on between women, they’re the ones that go on within women.

And I’m exhibit A.

Read the rest of this post at The Washington Post’s She The People blog…

Image: Dressy Bessy, the long view by massdistraction via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Dharun Ravi – the 20 year-old who was convicted last week for spying on his former Rutgers roommate, Tyler Clementi, with a webcam – has finally spoken to the press. And as a parent, I feel more conflicted about this case than ever.

This was never a straightforward case from the get-go. As Ian Parker’s remarkably detailed article in The New Yorker pointed out, there was no question that Ravi used his webcam to spy on Clementi while the latter was engaged in a sexual encounter with a man in their shared room at Rutgers. And there was also no question that Ravi had invited others to join in on a (failed) second viewing of another, similar encounter and then destroyed electronic evidence ex post.

What was never fully established was how much this incident drove Clementi to kill himself by jumping off of the George Washington Bridge the next day (as opposed to pre-existing mental health issues). Nor was it clear whether homophobia was what drew Ravi to invade his roommate’s privacy in the first place.

Like many, I was fascinated by this story from its inception. For starters, Clementi attended my public high school in suburban New Jersey – Ridgewood High – where many of my childhood friends now send their kids. So I always felt a personal connection to the case.

Read the rest of this post on The Washington Post’s She The People blog…

Image: 1 in 3 Teens by Tayrawr Fortune via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Shortly after my son was born 11 years ago, a friend of mine – the father of three much older kids – asked me how I was doing. At that point, I think we’d moved safely into that phase where I was no longer feeding my son every three seconds, he’d begun smiling at us, and my husband and I had more or less adjusted to this massive change in our lives.

“It’s such a great age,” I commented.

“They all are,” he replied.

It’s true, they *are* all great ages and I’m continually mystified by how exciting and interesting each phase of parenting is (even when I’m going through them for the second time with my daughter.)

But it’s also an ongoing challenge to parent and one always feels a bit behind the eight ball as you try desperately to figure out how best to react (or, indeed, whether to react at all) to our children’s behavior and emerging personalities.

To that end, this week I thought I’d share some new (but really) old parenting strategies that seem to prove their value again and again:

1.Incentives are better than punishments. When your kids misbehave – and particularly when they do the same annoying thing repeatedly – there’s a temptation to take something away from them: no television for a week, no play dates, no dessert. But rewards for good behavior are also much more effective than punishments for bad behavior, especially for younger children. In my own case, my daughter takes an inordinate amount of time to get dressed in the morning, producing frequent (and repetitive) conflicts. While my first instinct was to take away her computer time, I opted this week to try something new: if she can get dressed, brush hair and brush teeth each morning (and the reverse each evening) in under ten minutes, I’ll give her 50p a day. At the end of two weeks, if she does this consistently, she can buy a present for herself. (Bear in mind that she doesn’t have allowance right now.) I explained to her that we wouldn’t carry on buying gifts on a regular basis, but I’m hoping that by heaping praise on her in the next two weeks while we do this trial period, she’ll internalize the positive reinforcement and want to get dressed/undressed quickly, rather than only working for the extrinsic reward. So  far, so good.

2. Hitting doesn’t work. If you think that doesn’t bear repeating, think again. Here in the U.K. where I live, a Labour politician – who was, I kid you not, the former Education Minister – recently declared that if working class parents had more freedom to hit their children, we wouldn’t have had the riots that broke out here last summer. No sh$!. In a poll taken not so long ago, nearly one half of British parents surveyed said that they thought that teachers should be allowed to hit children to keep them in line. This, despite mounds of evidence showing that while spanking is very effective in the short run for altering a child’s behavior, in the long run it is completely counter-productive.

3. Understand where your kids are at, developmentally. Like many parents, I was absolutely fascinated by a recent article by Alison Gopnik  in The Wall Street Journal about the teenage mind. The upshot of the article is that teenagers are hitting puberty – and all the attendant hormonal, risk-taking changes in attitude this phase of life produces – much earlier than ever before, while becoming “adults” (in the sense of assuming responsibility for their own lives) ever later. The result is that their emotional development is out of sync  with their ability to exert judgment and self-control  in a way that it wasn’t even 20 years ago. Once I read this, I thought, Eureka! So that’s why my 11 year-old loves listening to Rap music but can’t be bothered to cut with a knife and fork properly.

4. Don’t micro-manage. I attended my son’s parent-teacher meetings earlier this week and was told by several of his teachers, independently, that they felt that while he had come into the school year a bit jumpy and unsettled, over the course of the year he had really calmed down. As a fellow manic, I can’t really criticize him too much on this score – the apple, as they say, doesn’t fall far from the tree. But I couldn’t help but wonder if my own New Year’s resolution to chill out and try to control him less wasn’t helping, in part, to chill him out in other parts of his life. Coincidence? Maybe. But I’m going to press on with this resolution – despite temptations to “fall off the wagon” – and see if I keep observing positive change.

5. Keep reading  books by Faber and Mazlish. Believe it or not I do think that you can over-train yourself in the art of parenting. Some of it has to be instinctual – and based, crucially, on your particular child’s nature – or you’ll drive yourself insane. But I will put in a plug for two books by parenting experts Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish that I will stand by: How To Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, as well as their companion volume, Siblings Without Rivalry. I remember parenting blogger Lisa Belkin saying that for many years, she and her husband kept dog-eared copies of these books by their respective bedsides. Ditto.

What tried and true parenting strategies work for you?

*****

If you’re interested in hearing my views on why we should all – including Marco Rubio – be reading Fidel Castro’s new memoirs, head on over to The Washington Post’s She The People blog.

Image: Little Johnnie Totally Deserved It by feminaerecta via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

I met a woman at a friend’s house a couple of years ago who told me that she’d hired a French nanny for her three young children so that they could learn French. I liked the idea and wished her well. But as she and her husband were both American, I secretly doubted that the experiment would bear much fruit.

I ran into her again a few weeks ago and we got to talking about her child care situation. She told me that all three kids – who now range in age from three to seven – were bilingual and that she had just finished ordering them some new books on Amazon France.

Wow! I thought. Impressive. And then I felt a pang of envy. Both of my kids are learning French in school. But they are a long way from bilingual. And even though the British Education Secretary has proposed that every child in the U.K. learn a foreign language from age five, that may actually be too late.

To wit, five facts about bilingualism:

1. Bilingualism affects brain development from infancy. A fascinating article in The New York Times explains the ways in which the brains of babies in bilingual households develop differently from those raised in a mono-lingual household. Apparently, while bilingual babies take longer to distinguish phonetic sounds in either language, once they do come to recognize them, they can then hear them in both languages, while mono-lingual babies lose this facility by the time they are one. Even in the womb, one study showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different. Wow!

2. When learning a foreign language, it’s best to start early. Younger learners still have the ability to develop near native-like pronunciation and intonation in a new language. They are also more open and curious (as a rule) to foreign peoples and cultures. There are also cognitive benefits to learning an additional language early. Bilingual children have greater neural activity and denser tissue in the areas of the brain related to memory, attention, and language than monolingual learners. These indicators are associated with long-term positive cognitive outcomes (see below).

3. But you can still learn a foreign language as an adult. While it’s true that our ability to hear and understand a second language becomes more difficult with age, the adult brain can be retrained to pick up foreign sounds more easily again. According to a study at University College London, the difficulties that adults have in learning languages are not biological, but perceptual. Thus, given the right stimuli, adult brains can overcome the habits they have developed to effectively crowd out certain sounds and learn new ones. Neat!

4. Bilingual people do better academically. Yet another reason to raise your kids speaking two (or more!) languages is that it enhances academic performance. Students who learn a foreign language out-score their non-foreign language learning peers in the verbal and – surprisingly, perhaps – math sections of standardized tests, particularly in the area of problem solving.  They do better in school and are also more open to diversity, according to François Thibaut, who runs The Language Workshop for Children, which has nine schools around the East Coast of the United States.

5. Bilingual people also do better in other areas of cognitive functioning. In addition to their double vocabularies, bilingual children have stronger and more flexible cognitive abilities. Mastering two or more languages helps them solve logic problems and handle multi-tasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.

I don’t know about you, but I find this stuff fascinating. In another life I will become a linguistic anthropologist. You?

Tsali Boulevard by Caveman Chuck Coker via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Well, I’m back from my ten-day vacation in the U.S., where – despite landing about 18 hours before Hurricane Irene kicked in – we managed to have a mostly bright and sunny family holiday filled with lots of swimming and relaxation.

Re-entry? Not so relaxing.

Within the first 24 hours of landing (on a red-eye), we viewed two flats for potential purchase, got caught in a torrential downpour which soaked all four pairs of Wellies (boots) worn in our family and began the migraine-inducing, spread-sheet requiring coordination nightmare that is planning the after-school activity calendar.

I’ve written before about how best to manage re-entry after a vacation and sadly, I did not really take my own advice this time around. (Addendum to this list: do not write checks when you have only slept for 1.5 hours.)

But I did one thing right, which was to resolve to tackle one “big” thing on my endless To-Do list: having my kids take more responsibility for themselves.

I’d been thinking about this before I went away and – per an earlier post on life skills for ten-year-olds – had already begun to put them in charge of things like cutting their own food and tying their own shoes. (Yeah, I know…pathetic. But better late than never.) They are also both required to do a chore: my son is in charge of the recycling and my daughter sets the table every night.

But as summer wore on, I realized how very much I do for both of them  – things like laying out my son’s school uniform in the morning and clearing all of the dirty plates from the table – the very sorts of things that no one did for me when I was ten years old.

While in the States, I also spent some time with my brothers’ six (!) kids and noticed how all of them – even the 6 and 8 year 0ld – do a lot for themselves.

And then, upon my return, I happened to read this fabulous post on the New York Times Motherlode blog entitled A Traveling Parent’s List. In it, legal scholar Lisa McElroy shares the lengthy and detailed To-Do list she left for her husband when departing on a recent two-week business trip. It includes things ranging from asking him to buy their daughter a sparkly (but not crop-topped) leotard  to telling him how to prepare home-made tomato sauce to requesting that he obtain more food for their pet frog.

I’m sure that this post was written tongue-in-cheek. But even if McElroy is making fun of her own control-freak tendencies, I’m guessing that there’s more than a hint of truth in there.

Lord knows she’s not alone. I just pulled up a document from my own computer, plucked from a week-long trip I took a few years back. On it, in addition to the sorts of normal things you might remind a spouse to do – like giving my son his asthma medicine and being sure that the kids bathe every so often (!) – there were also things like (original formatting included):

–please open Isaac’s book bag and take out any relevant slips/sheets etc, and save the weekly newsletter for me when I return; also clear out sandwiches/snacks/water etc as he wont have school for 10 days

–remember to wash Isaac with Green soap and for allie use 3 capfuls of white Oilatum stuff in the water

–after they’re done, coat her body with white lotion (and hydrocortisone as necessary)

REMEMBER TO LOOK IN HIS LUNCH BOX FOR HALF EATEN SANDWICH-SAVE FOR TOMORROW AND DITTO FOR FRUIT LEATHER ETC;

When I look at this list now, I cringe. And I know – in a way I perhaps didn’t realize even a few years back – that as with so many things involving our kids, this list is so much more about me than it is about them. My children don’t really need me to micro-manage their lives. They are both, in fact, quite independent. And my husband is more than capable of making sure that they get to school on time and eat their sandwiches.

Rather, *I* need to micro-manage their lives because it helps me to feel…in control. I’m not proud of that. But it’s true.

But that needs to change. Among other things, I’m hoping to go back to work full time (more on that later) so I will – per force – have to let go. My kids are also demanding more independence for themselves. My ten-year old wants to walk to school on his own. And if he does that, he’ll need a cell phone. (Both ideas terrify me.)

So, it’s time to cut some chords. As of about a month ago, they are both now in charge of making their own breakfasts. And last night I insisted that both of them clear their dirty plates from the table. I also let my son figure out when his violin lesson is happening this week, rather than looking into it for him.

These are small steps, I realize. But Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Nor is adulthood.

Image: 324/365 Lists by Vinnie123 via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

In the grand scheme of things, our household is pretty far out there on the anti-screen-time spectrum.

Our kids don’t own DS’s or Wii’s or Playstations, we limit their computer time, and neither my husband nor I ever plays video games.

I make no apologies for this lifestyle, as I’ve always believed – pace Roger Ebert and assorted others – that my time is better spent on other forms of art. Moreover, where my kids are concerned, I’m with those who maintain that children are better off learning to be bored.

And yet, a lot of my grown up friends play games. And many are firm believers that there is a lot to be said for gaming, beyond it just being fun.

In this spirit, and because – as a journalist – I firmly believe that you need to check your own biases, I’ve assembled five intelligent arguments I’ve come across recently about the relative merits of gaming. I’m not saying that I necessarily buy into the following list hook, line and sinker. But it has made me question some of my own suppositions.

To wit, here are five putative virtues of video games:

1. They teach you about complex systems. According to the Boston Globe, the next frontier for video games are ones that teach you about current events. Whether it’s how to understand the causes of the credit crunch or preventing the outbreak of food-borne disease, these games are thought to force people to see the news as a realm of choice and complexity rather than as packaged information. And that is something that traditional news outlets – by definition – cannot do.

2. They reward courage, skill and honor. That, at least, is the argument put forth by writer Trevor Butterworth in The Daily, who only discovered the joys of gaming in middle age. While Butterworth acknowledges that the worlds he creates Online aren’t as labor-intensive as the model-building he engaged in as a youth, he feels that the games industry has become, in effect, “a tribal elder for the world’s teenagers, pushing them through ever more complex feats of prestidigitation.” Others also see the potential for the acquisition of “real world” skills via gaming, whether because they reward good behavior or because, like chess, they teach strategy or planning.

3. They are interactive. If you’re like me, it’s tempting to put video games in the same box as television – i.e. as a mindless, passive activity that saps the imagination. But as a fellow commenter on Butterworth’s post pointed out, there’s actually a big difference between TV and video games. The former *is* passive, whereas the latter enables you to have input into your own story. In fact, he went so far as to favor video gaming over books on this point because you don’t have to read someone else’s tale; you are able to create your own. Food for thought.

4. They don’t have to come at the expense of reading. I think that a lot of parents – myself included – fear that video games will ruin our children’s desire to read. I’m not sure that we have conclusive evidence on this point yet. (One study suggests that having computers in the home increases a child’s computer literacy but not his or her literacy, although that’s somewhat different than video games per se.) But I was quite taken with this account by fellow-traveller Lorraine Rice who recounts how – despite her own reservations – she felt that video games taught her son how to read and to understand history. This whole question still makes me nervous, but I did find her piece reassuring.

5. They are inevitable. Of all the arguments in favor of video games, I find this to be the most persuasive, especially where children are concerned. As writer Andrew Leonard on Babble concludes, even if you try to eliminate violent video games in your own home, they are going to encounter them somewhere else. So you’re ultimately better off talking to your kids about what they are encountering in these games – and being part of that world *with* them – than pretending that this isn’t an integral part of today’s cultural landscape. A hard thing to swallow, but there it is.

So now I turn it over to you. What do you think? Are video games uniformly bad for kids or do they have some upsides?

Image: Video Game Walhalla by localjapantimes via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

Every Wednesday I offer tips for adulthood.

Over on the fabulous Beyond The Margins blog, Lisa Saffran has a great post about why teaching makes you a better writer.

It also makes you a better parent.

Here are five things my recent stint teaching writing taught me about parenting:

1. Focus on Praise. This is parenting 101 here, but it’s something that we parents - (OK, me) – frequently forget. I remember attending a parenting seminar a few years back. One of the central takeaway points (and yes, I did take notes!) was that you should always emphasize the positive with your children in very specific terms. (e.g., “Well done for putting your tee-shirt on your arms and not your legs!” or “How nice that you didn’t hit your sister!”) I noticed that when I was teaching, I was incredibly positive with the students, encouraging them for everything they did, because I knew that even if they didn’t always get things right, they were giving it their best shot. Moreover, I also figured that seeing me praise those who were trying hard would motivate those who were hanging back to come out of their shells and raise their hands. And you know what? It worked. But then on the bus ride home I thought, why don’t I do this with my own kids? Instead of constantly telling them what they do wrong and trying to make them “better,” why don’t I heap praise upon their accomplishments – large and small alike – as a way of encouraging them? As I said, parenting 101, to be sure, but a lesson worth re-learning.

2. Ignore bad behavior. A corollary to #1 is that when possible, you should ignore bad behavior. Perhaps because they weren’t my own children, I found it easy to ignore it when the kids acted up in class (which to be fair to them, wasn’t all that often.) But if they said a naughty word or went off on an irrelevant tangent or did something silly or chided another child, I just carried on as if I didn’t see it/hear it and could really care less. And once again, it startled me how quickly they gave up on the bad behavior when they saw that it wasn’t getting a rise out of me. My kids fight a lot and my son – in particular – isn’t very nice to his younger sister. And while I know that he’s doing a lot of that to get “negative” attention from me, I still find it hard not to step in to defend her. But as I observed when I was teaching, that’s usually counter-productive. The more I can ignore his bullying and teasing (except when it gets violent), the less likely he is to do it.

3. Change takes time. I’ve been teaching creative writing for the past few weeks to junior high-aged students. On the last day of class, we did a workshop where the kids had to read a selection of their work (poem/story/memoir) and talk about how they’d incorporated at least two of the writing techniques we’d learned to improve their writing. One of the groups I was working with really took this on board and came to class prepared to talk about their revisions. But the other group hadn’t really done so. Which surprised me, since it was very clear to me during the lessons that they’d gotten the material. At first, I took this as a sign that I’d failed as a teacher (with this group, anyway.) But when I talked about it later with their English teacher, she said that she sees this all the time. And what she’s come to realize is that you can’t expect them to absorb everything overnight. They might well “get” what it is that you’re teaching them in class, but it might still take weeks – if not months – for those lessons to show up in their writing. This is good advice for parents as well. At least for those of us who are – cough - trying to impart certain life skills to our ten-year-olds, we need to understand that it progress is incremental. And if we lower our expectations, our kids may actually surpass them.

4. Shout as a last resort. One of the biggest differences I’ve encountered in the British school system (vs. the American one) is that it’s OK for teachers to shout at kids. I’m not here to defend that behavior – or even to analyze it. But I did notice that the teacher I worked with only shouted as a last resort. She tried any other manner of strategies with the (sometimes quite boisterous) kids short of yelling at them when they did something wrong: dialoguing, incentivizing, cajoling, ignoring. Even that old chestnut, counting to three. Again, more good advice for parents. Sometimes shouting just seems like the most efficient short-cut when you’re annoyed with your kid for setting the house on fire. And sometimes it’s useful. But it should be the last thing you do as a parent, not the first.

5. Don’t assume you know everything. When you’re teaching a class – especially if there are a lot of pupils – you can’t always tell who’s paying attention and who isn’t. Moreover, sometimes the kids who speak up the most produce the weakest written work and vice-versa. In one of the classes I just taught, one boy who never opened his mouth once produced two jaw-droppingly beautiful poems. It’s the same with parenting. You don’t always know what’s going on in your kids’ minds. So you need to watch. And listen. They might just surprise you.

Image: Students In Classrooms at UIS 10-15-10 by jeremy.wilburn via Flickr under a Creative Commons license.