A few weeks ago, I was sitting in the dining room with the girls and my mom, and Rhys burst into song.  This isn’t at all unusual, but the lyrics surprised me:  “Oh, how I love Jeeeeesus…” repeated over and over.  After establishing that it was a real song, I had to think fast about how to defuse the situation without stepping on mom’s toes (she being the source of such, um, exposures).

I’m not sure I quite got the melody (it came out a little atonal even though I followed Rhys’s lead), but we sang it over and over with revised lyrics—instead of Jesus we sang about random things we like, the majority of which happened to be in my line of sight (e.g., “Oh, how I love maaaaarshmallows…”)  It had us all laughing, even my mom.  It may have been polite laughter, but I’m tallying it in the Win column, regardless.

See, folks, it’s not just a blog name…

You’ve (maybe) seen the photos; now see the video!  My brother Mark has a talent for creating videos, and for choosing just the right music (in our house, Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks” is known as “the Baby Ian video song”).  Enjoy!

[Watch it on YouTube]

Earlier this week, when the girls were staying with my mom, Rhys had a nightmare.  As my mom wrote in an email, “she said I told her that you got rid of her drum set and she was upset because she still is five!”  (She got an adorable little drum kit as a birthday present a little over a month ago.)

Probably as a reaction to the fact that her dream painted me as a horrible monster, I’ve been all about reinforcing her dream of being a drummer this week.  First, I happened across an orange, drum kit-covered muscle shirt in Target and bought it for her.  Then I brought home a book about the drums from the library (which is, naturally, how I try to fix every problem—with our library cards!)  Then today, for the win, she met fellow drummer Daron Henry from Recess Monkey outside the doors of Kindiefest this morning.

I feel like I’ve shown down that evil version of me from her nightmare, and we could tell that her confidence had been restored from a conversation with her this afternoon:

Rhys:  I’ve never rocked with Recess Monkey before.

Nate:  We’ve seen them before, remember…?

Rhys:  But I’ve never ROCKED with them!

(beat, as we realize she’s planning to take the stage)

Rhys:  We need to go home and get my drum set!

Me:  (misguided attempt at placation)  I don’t think it’s going to fit in the car with us…

Rhys:  No, we need to take it apart and put it in the trunk!

Why didn’t I think of that?

It was too cute.  We explained that it was too long of a drive to go back for anything at this point.  Then, to be sure, let her know that she couldn’t climb up on stage with anyone tomorrow.

We were also sure to let her know that, if she sticks with it, she’ll probably have her own band some day.

Last night I tossed and turned for hours because I was preoccupied.  This morning, in between the many times I pressed the snooze button, I slid right back into the same ruminations.

I’ve been worrying about kindergarten.

Perhaps that doesn’t deserve a “duhn-duhn-duhnnnn.”  Or even an “oooooh…”  But it’s all I’ve been thinking about for days.

Rhys’s preschool is the best, and we’d keep her there for kindergarten if money were no object.  But, of course, money is an object.  Ever since my student loans kicked into repayment, most months end with a fair amount of figurative nail-biting.

Last month, Nate and I made the heart-wrenching decision to have the girls stay with my parents during the week this summer, and having them come home for the weekends.  (Heart-wrenching for us; the girls and the grandparents are thrilled.)  But our empty-nest weekdays are going to leave us with an extra $200 a week. ^[1]  The plan was to pay down the debt from the months that ended in the red, and build up some savings to prevent that from happening in the year ahead.

But I kept thinking about it. $200 a week is a hell of a lot of money, at least for us.  And we could keep that money if Rhys went to public school this year.  Here’s the thing:  We live in a great neighborhood with a great school, but they only offer half-day kindergarten.  And you don’t even get to choose morning or afternoon.  It’s a working parent’s nightmare.

Fortunately, my mother is willing and able to watch Rhys for a few hours a day.  Our desire for financial stability has won.  Pride?  Swallowed.  Plus, Rhys is excited to be going where the big kids go.

Even though the decision has been made, I’m still a bit preoccupied.  I thought filling out all the vairous forms, and gathering the all the various documents we need to prove our residency, would settle my mind.  Not yet.  Maybe making a new budget will help.  But, anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to lately.  Worrying.

It’s gotta end sometime, hopefully soon.  We’ll see.

^[1] Sending them both full-time for the summer would be considerably more, but that’s the figure we’re paying during the school year.

In a lot of ways, I still identify as Catholic.  I wouldn’t say it’s ingrained, but it was a large part of how I was raised.  I never had a falling out with the Church, and when talking about it, I still use the world “we.”  Let’s leave it at that for now.

For us, Easter is the most sacred of holy days.  Because of that, I thought (and still do) that an egg-bearing anthropomorphic rabbit seems to make a mockery of a holiday that deserves its sanctity.  (By contrast, I’ve always thought of Christmas as an anything-goes birthday bash.)  I wasn’t so offended by the Easter Bunny that I wouldn’t take his candy, though.  No kid is that principled.

Now that our little family has abandoned religion, we’ve had to figure out how to celebrate Easter.  Or not.  Easter without religion seems meaningless.  I’m not into the “celebration of spring,” either.  This isn’t the vernal equinox.

For now, I’ve found that egg hunts are a satisfactory celebration.  We went to the annual egg hunt in Stark Park on Saturday, and then later I found myself at the store buying eggs and candy so we could repeat the process at home Sunday morning.  Was it a clever ploy to give them something to do as Nate and I slept in?  Partly.  But searching for things—candy-filled things, no less—is pretty fun.

When I was buying the supplies, I was asked an oddly direct question by the checkout clerk:  “Do you like Easter?”  Oh, not really, I said as I fumbled with the debit machine.  “Yeah, you didn’t seem like you do.”  I am an outwardly pessimistic shopper, apparently.  Or maybe he noticed my dazed look as I was trying to figure out which items were least overpriced. ^[1]  I told him about my two kids, and how it sort of obligated me to participate in the holiday.

The unforeseen honesty of the exchange had two results.  One was that I engaged in uncharacteristic eye contact (for me) when I thanked him, and he told me to have a nice day like he really meant it.  The other was that I realized how much I really, really, really don’t like Easter.  That, more than its religious nature, is why I struggle with how to celebrate the holiday.

Historically, my favorite religious holiday was Holy Thursday.  A few weeks ago I stumbled across a stored painting of the last supper that my mother had bought for me in 1995.  (Not a replication of Leonardo’s [above], but the location & posture of disciples are parallel.)  I pulled it out early last week and displayed it without explanation.  I was somewhat unsure of my reasons, or at least unable to verbalize them.

It deserves to be said that Nate asked me, at the end of the week, whether I brought it out as an April fool’s joke.  Ha.  That sounds like me, but no.

When Thursday rolled around, I decided that we should have a big family dinner.  Then it occurred to me that I was really tired, so we went out to eat.  Before we left the house, I tried to nutshell the last supper for the girls.  There are a number of ways to spin it, but I was going for a “live every day like it’s your last” sentiment.  I don’t think I was particularly successful, since they don’t really understand the context.  Maybe next year.

I made certain to have red wine and bread with dinner that night.  Blasphemous, maybe, but close enough.

Top image credit:  “All of Your Eggs in One Basket” by Flickr user Zach Minster, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 license.

^[1]  CVS, some unit prices in your candy aisle would be great.  kthxbye.

The day Gigi was born, March 2003

Gigi’s first birthday, March 2004

Gigi’s second birthday, March 2005

The day Rhys was born, March 2005

The girls’ first and third birthdays, March 2006

Gigi’s fourth birthday, March 2007

Rhys’s second birthday, March 2007

The girls’ third and fifth birthdays, March 2008

The 2009 birthdays were low-key family affairs, and I don’t think we took any pictures…but if we find some I’ll post them.

In my last post, I mentioned a listserv message that had me incensed.  The gist of it was to ask what other libraries were doing with their Baby Einstein DVDs since the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) released their study that showed that children under two shouldn’t watch videos.

I’m not sure what makes me cringe more—that the person thinks that the AAP actually conducted research on the topic, or that they think such research happened recently.  If you’re thinking of discarding all DVDs aimed at a certain population, maybe you should take a glance at the research, and not just rely on media confusion and listserv subscribers…?!

The AAP hasn’t conducted research

The AAP published their position statement about children’s media in 1999, and it states that children under two shouldn’t watch TV:

“Pediatricians should urge parents to avoid television viewing for children under the age of 2 years.  Although certain television programs may be promoted to this age group, research on early brain development shows that babies and toddlers have a critical need for direct interactions with parents and other significant care givers (eg, child care providers) for healthy brain growth and the development of appropriate social, emotional, and cognitive skills.  Therefore, exposing such young children to television programs should be discouraged.”

AAP Policy Committee on Public Education.  (1999).  Media education.  Pediatrics 104(2), 341-343.

http://aappolicy.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/pediatrics;104/2/341

The AAP makes no claim that videos are actually harmful.  What they say is that time spent watching TV takes away from time playing and interacting with people—things that a multitude of research studies have proven to be integral to healthy development.  It’s self-evident.  Time spent doing one thing equals less time available to do something else.  You obviously don’t need to conduct any research to back up that statement.

And yet one might find this abstinence policy a little extreme.  As mentioned in the previous post, parents can make TV time into an interactive experience; but even when it’s used as a momentary diversion, is that really such a bad thing?  Is it imperative that we interact with babies every hour of every day?

Ethical quandary

I’m sure there is research on that topic—whether we should incessantly prattle at babies, or if we should give them downtime.  With all the time, motivation, and database access in the world, I could find an answer for you.  However, even with all of those things, I could not tell you whether videos are actually harmful to babies, because the AAP has precluded such research with their policy statement.  By saying that no child under two should be exposed to television, they render any controlled study on the topic unethical.

Where does that leave scientists who want to research the subject?  Pretty much restricted to parent surveys.  It’s not as though a survey study can’t make its way into a peer-reviewed journal—it happens—but its validity will always be considered somewhat suspect.  Who wouldn’t be tempted to tell a white lie or two to avoid sounding like a horrible parent?  Just me?  Doubt it.

What the CCFC says

The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood (CCFC) has a “fact” sheet on their website entitled Baby Scam, which derides the makers of videos for children, particularly Baby Einstein.  My favorite part is the cigarette pack style warning:  “THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS RECOMMENDS NO SCREEN TIME FOR CHILDREN UNDER THE AGE OF TWO.”  Doesn’t it make you want to panic, like letting your kids watch these videos is on par with handing them a pack of smokes, or maybe a bottle filled with scalding hot coffee or household cleaners?  Or just about anything you read on Really Bad Parenting Advice?

And yet, if you read through it (and especially if you check their citations), you realize that the most mud they can sling is to say that research on the subject is inconclusive.  How frightening.

But…they have footnotes!

Let’s comb through some of the claims the CCFC makes in Baby Scam, shall we?  They definitely zeroed in on the parts that served their purpose.  Me, I’m more of a “What did they conclude?” kind of girl.

Baby Scam says, “Television viewing is negatively associated with regular sleep patterns for babies.”  The study they cite says:

“Our data are cross-sectional, which precludes us from making causal inferences.  However [ . . . ] it is plausible that television viewing leads to disordered sleep in this young population.”  (emphasis mine)

Thompson, D. A. and Christakis, D.  (2005).  The association between television viewing and irregular sleep schedules among children less than 3 years of age.  Pediatrics 116(4), 851-856.

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/116/4/851

N.B.  Read page 855 for several other “limitations to this study that deserve comment.”

Baby Scam says, “For babies 8 to 16 months, every hour spent watching baby videos is associated with slower language development—they know six to eight words less on a standardized vocabulary test than babies who don’t watch.”  The study says:

“Further research is required to determine the reasons for an association between early viewing of baby DVDs/videos and poor language development.”

Zimmerman, Frederick J., Christakis, Dimitri A., and Meltzoff, Andrew N.  (2007).  Associations between media viewing and language development in children under age 2 years (abstract).  The Journal of Pediatrics 151(4), 364-368.

http://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(07)00447-7/abstract

I could go on, but I think you’ve got enough data to sense a pattern.  I won’t contend that there are associations between watching videos and [insert bad thing], but we don’t know how many other factors may be contributing to [bad thing].  I guess it’s not necessary to demonstrate that one causes the other before picking up a pitchfork.

Further reading

In 2005, Kaiser Family Foundation published The Effects of Electronic Media on Children Ages Zero to Six: A History of Research, a comprehensive literature review spanning five decades.  Not to spoil the ending, but their “conclusion” about media effects on children under two was that more research is needed—no surprise there.  For an overview of more recent research, see Baby Einstein Controversy: What Parents Need to Know on Paula Slade’s Children’s Entertainment Examiner blog.

Top image credit:  “baby einstein” by Flickr user Kimblah, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 license.

Bottom image credit:  “The magic of television” by Flickr user Ian Turk, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 license.

I started writing this post in the fall, amidst all the mad drama between the CCFC and Baby Einstein, and all the journalistic and blogging noise that came with it.  I abandoned the post, not caring to add my spit in the ocean of misinformation, but I kept the draft because I happened to love it.  I’m glad I did, because I’m incensed again after reading a painfully inaccurate listserv message yesterday.

I’m long-winded, if you haven’t noticed, so this is going to be segmented.  Today’s post is about applying common sense to the issue.  The follow-up will be about what the research actually says—or doesn’t, as it happens.

I’m not on Baby Einstein’s payroll.  I just happened to find the videos useful when the girls were little.

The imperfect parent

Parenting is challenging.  Parenting infants who don’t nap well and pretty much bawl whenever you aren’t holding them is difficult.  Parenting infants who don’t nap well and pretty much bawl whenever you aren’t holding them, without a strong support system in place, is just plain hard.  But one day you notice that your baby will stare at pretty much anything on a television screen, at least for 20 minutes, which is just long enough to grab a shower.  Hooray!

Now…what would you want to expose your child to while you grab that shower?  Probably not Quentin Tarantino.  Probably not Maury Povich, and (as much as I love it) probably not Days of our Lives, either.  Hey, what about PBS?  That’s purportedly educational, right?  Except Sesame Street is over your baby’s head, and it would be hard to live with yourself if you let them watch Teletubbies.  Cue celestial music and spotlight-from-above as you happen across a Baby Einstein DVD in the store.

Are you picking it up with fantasies of never having to interact with your child again?  Does your near future suddenly involve requesting information packets from Harvard?  No, damn it, you just really want that shower.  If you’re at all deluded, it’s that you think everyone around you is also pulling for you to have that shower.  (Trust me, none of the rest of us even noticed, let alone minded.)

The DVDs

The first thing you notice about the Baby Einstein videos is how formulaic they are.  Set to reorchestrated (“for little ears”) classical music, the early videos are a series of toys parading across the screen, short puppet skits, and scenes of babies and children playing.  These are all punctuated with painfully obvious, excessive use of video wipes, like the page turn wipe.  As any discerning parent can tell after one viewing, it’s not about to turn any child into a genius.  That doesn’t make the videos inherently bad.

After the video is done playing—at least, this is how it was when my girls were young enough to be watching them—there is a little montage, overdubbed with company info and parent testimonials narrated by creator Julie Clark.  She talks about how parents should interact with their children while the videos are playing, connecting the images on the screen with interactive learning experiences.  Baby Einstein never said, “plop your child in front of our product and they will become, like, wicked smart.”  They straight-forwardly said that parent or caregiver needs to be actively involved to make the most of their videos.

Educational value

Children are always learning.  Always, whether or not you want them to.  Like that time you dropped the pickle jar on the kitchen floor and uttered the expletives that came back to bite you at the big family reunion.  As far as I’m concerned, you can slap an educational label on anything.  If you get to call sugary cereal with 10% of the DRV of calcium a “good source” of it, then really any product that offers a smidgen of, say, shape recognition should be able to call itself educational.  “Educational” is such a vague term anyway.  How should we research it?  Standardized tests for toddlers?

Clearly you don’t know how I feel about standardized tests.

My knowledge of child development is far from extensive, but I do know a bit about emergent literacy and language acquisition.  One of the pillars of literacy is vocabulary, and (to break out the librarian propaganda) the easiest and most effective way to increase a baby’s vocabulary is to narrate what you do, and point the things that you see.  You can point things out on a walk or in a grocery store.  You can point things out on the pages of a book.  And, yes, you can even point things out on a TV screen.

Common sense

From birth throughout the preschool years, children learn primarily through play.  We all know this; despite all the conflicting theories of child rearing and education, learning through play is almost universally accepted.  Is a baby going to learn cause and effect or creative problem-solving by watching a toy parade on a video?  I think we can safely say, probably not.

Nonetheless, you shouldn’t worry that this precludes you from taking that shower.  Yes, it’s good to interact with your baby while they watch the video, but you don’t have to do it every time.  You need to take time for yourself, and your baby needs downtime, too.  Judging from my own parenting experience, the amount of stimulation an unmoderated video causes is negligible.  I’d say it qualifies as downtime, in the same way you or I might relax in front of the TV at the end of a long day.

At the very least, plopping your baby in front of Baby Beethoven while you take 20 minutes for yourself isn’t going to cause them any harm.

…Wait, there are seriously organizations that are telling us that these seemingly innocuous videos ARE harmful?!  We’ll see about that.  Stay tuned for the follow-up post, and we’ll sort it out.  And I promise to stop talking about personal hygiene.

Last Friday, Geraldine’s school had a “Hats for Haiti” fundraiser.  I didn’t send her with the dollar/hat for a few reasons, the main one being that they didn’t tell us where the money was going.  Regardless of the fact that it was only a dollar, I’m not going to give my money vaguely “to Haiti.”  The list of charities I’m willing to support is much shorter than the list of those I’m not comfortable supporting.

I had not taken the time to explain this to Geraldine, however, and she assumed that I was careless and had forgotten, which is all too often the case.  When I picked her up from school, she said she would remind me “next time it’s Hats for Haiti.”  Next time?  I asked if anyone had explained the purpose of the fundraiser to her class.  She said no, with an intonation that suggested no one had mentioned anything about it having an actual purpose.

I guess that explains the gimmicky nature of the fundraiser—you can convince kids to want to wear hats without bothering to explain anything else to them!  It reinforced my decision not to participate, but it also provided an opportunity (that I should have provided myself, in all honesty) to discuss the situation with her.

I started out by recalling what I had learned about earthquakes in an introductory course in high school…15 years ago (gasp!)…hoping I was more or less getting the information right.  I moved on to talk about what little I know about Haiti (in general), then gave a very broad overview of what happened:  “A lot of buildings collapsed, and a lot of people got hurt.”  Finally, I explained what the monetary donations were for, how it’s important to pick a charity equipped to provide the most help to the most people, and why I wasn’t comfortable giving money to Hats for Haiti.

She seemed receptive.

Then, yesterday, I overheard that the earthquake in Haiti had worked its way into their pretend play.  First of all, awesome.  I’m glad they’re tackling the big issues.  On the other hand, that led to Geraldine explaining the situation to Rhys, which meant paraphrasing the under-informed explanations I had given her.  It sounded pretty okay (i.e., she seemed to absorb a lot of what I told her), but clearly we need to take some time and expand our collective knowledge.

Reading Rockets posted an article in mid-January called “It Happened Over There: Understanding and Empathy Through Children’s Books.”  It’s a resource guide for using picture books to explain natural disasters, and contains a book list with fiction titles that explore Haitian culture and nonfiction titles that talk about earthquakes.  The plan is to work our way though a number of the books, both fiction and nonfiction.  We’ll let you know how it goes.

Credits:
photo by my mom (she dressed them, too!) ; background ; font