My daughter was eyeing the Sesame Street wrapped package she'd proudly placed on the far edge of the present table. The tangled wad of tape where she'd "helped" just barely covered the word "dinosaur."

"When is present time?" I whispered to the lucky little boy's mom. She looked aghast. "Um, we don't want Little Timmy [name changed to protect the rude] to look at his birthday like it's all about the gifts," she said. "You know, we prefer him to value giving over receiving."

Thus heralded my introduction to the "no opening gifts" party, to be followed as my daughter entered preschool by a steady mix of more of the same, interspersed with the "no gifts, please bring a donation to [insert your charity here]."

I admit I'd prefer a little bit of value for receiving. I have yet to receive a thank you note from one of those parties. It turns out raising a giving child doesn't naturally beget raising a thankful one.

"You would think they go on the same empathy line," says Amy Dworetsky, a child psychologist who works with adolescents in upstate New York. "But look at it developmentally, and forcing them to give is going against every developmental thread in their body. Kids under five are very egocentric. They're me, me, me."

In other words — they aren't learning to enjoy or even value giving. They're doing it begrudgingly.

Thank you, on the other hand, is something that can be taught from a very young age and quickly becomes second nature. Research shows the feeling it implies — gratitude — will follow, but does not become a fully developed part of a child's personality until age five or six.

"For children and parents, receiving should not be about the actual receiving but rather about learning the delicate skill of being gracious," says Megan Jordan, a mother of three from Gulfport, Mississippi and editor-in-chief of BlogNosh. "So what if your kid has a million toys and you'd rather her guests donate to the Humane Society? I'm betting your kid could use some honing of her 'receiving' skills. And yeah, that may mean receiving her fortieth My Little Pony. Deal with it, kid. And do it by showing gratitude and thankfulness even though you already have nine of that color."

Jordan is aware her kids are still young, but she is attempting to give her elder children — boys, three and five — early cues to balance out materialism. It's not about the object received at a holiday, she tells them, but the fact that someone was kind enough to give it.

"I tell them, 'If you get the same present, you say something about how awesome it is that you have a back-up now or something similar'," she explains.

Despite parents' push to move the toys out and turn off the materialistic faucet, it turns out "stuff" isn't necessarily so bad for kids either. A Harris Interactive survey of more than 1,200 kids between the ages of eight and eighteen found kids who were grateful for what they had were also more generous, even if they were fairly materialistic. The child who sits at a holiday function screaming, "Presents, presents, presents!" and ripping through each box is not learning to be thankful, Dworetsky allows. "My kids have a lot of stuff, it makes me crazy," she said with a laugh. "But if they appreciate where it came from, and they acknowledge where it came from, that stuff is a teaching tool."

What's more, the experts say the exchange of material goods, including holiday extravaganzas with the kids, can offer lessons in thankfulness even when the kids receive something they don't care for or simply don't get that much-wanted Xbox. Kids learn social nuances: how to be grateful that someone else did something for them (in this case, buy a gift) and how to express thankfulness rather than regret.

"Kids have to learn not everything is equal," Kashdan explains. "You can only control fifty percent of a social reaction. Short-term pain is a great tool, it teaches kids to be flexible in different situations."

It's a means to move young children out of a me-centered world, something they're generally ready to face by kindergarten. And gracious kids, it turns out, are better equipped for school. A 2008 study by professors at the University of California, Davis and Hofstra University linked "children who practice grateful thinking" to better attitudes toward school and family life.

"The research on gratitude shows better health and mental health outcomes for persons who are higher in gratitude, and that gratitude is something that can be cultivated (e.g. journaling something each day for which one is grateful)," explains Ramani Durvasula, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. "These are easy skills to build in kids. In my home at dinner, when my children are with me, we play the highs and lows game. Each of us shares the high and low point of our day and then reflect on what we learned from these things. It forces us to take stock of our days, and realize that even the low stuff represents a salient and useful learning experience."

Even with gratitude there can be too much of a good thing. Like the no-gift parties, experts warn against pushing kids too hard to be "thankful." If a two-year-old is terrified of the giver, a well-meaning parent who suggests again and again that the child bestow a kiss as thanks is connecting thank you with an old man with bad breath and bristly whiskers. Would you want to say thank you again? Likewise it's wise to avoid a tit-for-tat situation, in which a child is taught that they need to reciprocate for each and every gift. Who can be grateful when they're too busy focusing on keeping score?

"If we feel that there's a sense of duty or obligation that we have to do something in return, it can negate the affects of gratitude," Kashdan explains.

]]>Jeanne Sager http://www.babble.com/family-road-trip-survival-guide-holiday/The holidays are quickly approaching and that can only mean one thing – road trip! Before packing the kids in the car and heading out to Grandma's, make sure you're ready with this road trip survival kit. Trust us, it'll make the trip much smoother. – Christina Couch

YakPack

Most families carry a first aid kit, but few are prepared for motion sickness, illness and food spills. Each YakPack comes with plastic bags, latex gloves, a plastic scoop, antimicrobial wipes and absorbent, deodorizing powder. Though you may never have to actually use the YakPack, having peace of mind knowing that your car's interior won't be sacrificed on the way home from Aunt Betsy's Thanksgiving dinner is worth the $8 alone.

Sleeping Bags

Bring at least one per child. Operating as blankets, pillows, backseat forts, dividers between siblings or picnic blankets for roadside meals, sleeping bags may actually be the only thing bringing weary parents peace.

Music That Doesn't Suck

Six hours of Old MacDonald is going to get old mighty fast. To break the boredom, either create your own family-friendly playlist — say, for every song the kids pick, Mom and Dad get to pick one too — or try out a few kid CDs that are adult-friendly too. We highly suggest Brats on the Beat: Ramones for Kids , Kimya Dawson's Alphabutt album and No! by They Might Be Giants.

Car Games

Tired of I-Spy, Twenty Questions and the license plate game? So are your kids. Ultimate Road Trip Games ($14.95) provides 140 pages of fresh family-friendly games to beat the boredom and Pressman Toy's 12 in 1 game set ($5.29) offers a dozen games including magnetic checkers, chess and tic tac toe. While the latter may not be suitable for smaller children (due to the tiny, oh-so-swallowable pieces), it's sure to keep kids ages seven and up occupied for a while. Free printable travel games are also available at GetRoadReady.com.

Cyclops Atom Headlamp

Driving at night usually means that traveling kids are either sleeping or whining. To keep the whines at bay, this miner-style reading light gives children a few more hours of reading and playtime when the sun goes down. It's also useful for nighttime games once you've finally reached your destination.

An Audio Escape

If the kids are wrapped up in games or sleeping, take time for yourself (while you can). To get a few adult moments in between family time, pop in an audio book or one of the bazillion cheap podcasts on iTunes. "This American Life," "How Stuff Works," NASA, Oprah and National Public Radio all offer free podcasts on topics ranging from celebrity gossip to space technology.

Nintendo DS

In an ideal world, road trips would be delightful excursions filled with engaging family conversation. In reality, sitting in a cramped car for several hours with kids usually means at least some whining, sibling fights and wars over the music. Burying your kid in a video game for an hour or so may not be the most intellectual way to spend a lengthy car ride, but it can give Mom and Dad a few hours of peace. To avoid numbing your child's brain, check out our list of creativity-building video games here .

Space Bags

Road trips are hard enough even if everyone's got ample leg room. To save on packing space, these vacuum-sealed bags shrink clothes to one-third of their normal size so you can pack more with less space. While the bag is like kryptonite for clothes that wrinkle easily, it works wonders for casual outfits, under-things and children's wear.

CarMD

The last thing you need is a mid-trip breakdown. Designed to catch engine problems early, this handheld gadget plugs into your car's internal computer (provided that the car was made after 1996) and lets drivers know if there are any engine or emissions problems before they begin driving. If there is one, CarMD will connect you with a call support center manned by trained mechanics and technicians. While the device can't guarantee that your trip will run smooth as butter, it can predict if your car will.

Chapter Books

They may not be as flashy or eye-catching as DS games, but good old fashioned books can actually be fun on a road trip, particularly when they're read round-robin style in zany voices. To get kids excited about their destination, choose a book that's either set in or about the town where you're headed. GoodLittleTraveler.com contains an extensive list of travel books for toddlers and pre-schoolers.

Tom Tom One 125 Portable GPS Navigator

Were you supposed to take 55 West to 65 North or 65 West to 55 North? Don't worry, this guy will read your directions for you. One of the cheapest and most reliable GPS systems on the market, the Tom Tom One 125 comes with US maps already loaded as well as alternative routes in case of traffic or a sudden detour. Roadside necessities — food, gas stations, toll roads — are all in the system, as are major attractions, beaches, campgrounds, car repair shops, hospitals and police stations. Granted, it's not as well-stocked as newer, pricier models, but for families looking for a modestly-priced way to avoid getting lost, it's hard to beat.

Keep Your Cooler Beach Backpack Cooler

You're going to need snacks for the road, so instead of relying on crappy fast food, pack healthy hunger-busters and keep them cold. In addition to feeding traveling kids on the go, the backpack straps make this sucker easy to haul out to the beach, sports games and family hikes.

Potette Plus Portable Potty

Everybody poops and thanks to this fold-away potty with disposable liners, your kids can even when there's not a sanitary restroom for miles. Holding up to five ounces of liquid and suitable for children weighing 50 lbs or less, the Potette Plus doubles as both a stand-alone portable toilet and a collapsible training seat. The potty comes with three disposable liners, but getting rid of them . . . well . . . that's up to you.

Wagan Power Dome

If you do have a roadside breakdown, Wagan Power Dome will come to the rescue. A jump starter, air compressor, storage unit and outlet all rolled into one, the Power Dome can restart a dead battery, pump up a tire and play your iPod at the same time. Lights, jumper cables and space to store a first aid kit are also included. Go ahead, breathe a sigh of relief.

Find more:

25 Kid Car Songs Even Parents Can Stand

Best Audio Books for Road Trips

10 Most Famous Road Trips in the U.S.

This article was written by Christina Couch for Babble.com, the magazine and community for a new generation of parents.

Congrats on the new addition to the family. How's it going so far? Are you exhausted yet?

No, it's actually fine. He's ten weeks old now so we sleep a little longer. My wife [Lori Silverbush] and I decided to tag team with feedings. My feeling is you can go one night without sleep but two nights is too hard so we're trying to break it up a bit.

It's his first Thanksgiving! How is it done at the Colicchio house?

The last couple years I haven't done it. My big dinner is Christmas Eve — 99% of all Italian Americans have fish dinners. It's all seafood. It starts off with a frio miso and then we move into a couple of seafood dishes — a salt cod or baklava salad that we serve with a beet dish. Then there's usually marinated sardines and anchovies, and then we go into a cuchuco which is a big fish stew that I serve over linguine and finish up with a whole roasted cod with lemons, olives, parsnip and garlic. I love doing Thanksgiving but the last couple of years I've gone to my wife's mother's who is a very, very excellent cook.

So you can sit back and relax.

Yeah, or catch up on sleep.

Have you taken him out to a restaurant yet?

Sure. We were in Napa Valley the other day so we took him to [Thomas Keller's] Ad Hoc. I feel like before your baby turns one you can take them pretty much anywhere and they'll just go to sleep but after that, put them away for a couple years.

I used to be a waitress and we had some loud screaming babies in the middle of our restaurant.

My feeling is if the baby is loud and screaming, you've gotta leave. If something's going on and you can't get him quiet, just pick him and leave. Say, "Sorry, I gotta go."

Do you let your kids order from the kid's menu?

No, kids should order off the menu. I think they're better off ordering appetizers. Some kids are picky eaters but I think a lot of it has to do with parents saying, "Oh, you won't like that. You don't want to eat that." Why? You don't know what they like until they try it.

How would a parent go about exposing their child to new foods so they don't end up with a kid who wants to eat mac and cheese every day?

From a very early age, I think it's a good idea to open them up to new flavors, new foods and different ethnic cuisines. Traveling is always great. But again, I think a lot of the problem is that kids eat like their parents and their parents aren't trying. I remember giving my kid oysters and saying, "Here, try it. It's not going to bother you." But when they get to school, his classmates go, "Oh my god, you eat that? That's horrible."

So leading by example.

Right. My son's mother, she doesn't use mustard. Hates it. So my son hates mustard.

You're talking about Dante, who's sixteen. At that age, I thought my parents were the most uncool people ever. But he can't possibly think that — you're a judge on Top Chef!

Yeah, he was pretty easy until the baby came home and all of a sudden, he was like, "You guys don't know what you're doing!" All of a sudden he became a teenager. But no, I think he still likes hanging out with us.

Was he excited about becoming an older brother?

Oh yeah. He was actually in the delivery room at the very end — he wasn't at the business end of things. And he took a little video, which was pretty cool.

Did he get the cooking genes?

No, not so much the cooking the end of it. He's into food, he loves eating. He likes going out to dinner ? he gets that from both his mom and me. We have him try everything. If he doesn't like it, that's fine, but he can't not eat it just because it's green. He does help me every now and then but it's not something that he's passionate for. He's really into photography.

When did your interest in cooking start?

When I was thirteen. I loved food. Food was always very important. I would go fishing with my grandfather at a very young age and it was my job to clean the fish. For some reason I was interested in not just eating but also the process of it, and at thirteen I realized I was pretty good at it. I never thought [food] was a mystery. I was never afraid to cook. You put something in a pan, you change it, you look at it and you figure it out. It's not that difficult.

Could you have ever seen yourself with someone who just had no interest in food?

It would make things difficult.

So your wife's into cooking, I presume?

Oh yeah. We both cook. There are times when she cooks and there are times that I do. Usually at home it's very simple. The other night, I literally had a bunch of vegetables that were starting to turn in the refrigerator so I cut them all into thin slices. Butternut squash, leeks, green beans, shallots, turnips and a little bit of garlic. And I had this little tiny pasta. I started with a little bit of bacon I cut really fine, then added the vegetables and kept cooking it really slowly, adding some chicken until it was almost like a soup. Then I put the pasta in and finished it with a good amount of basil. And that was it. That was dinner. That's the kind of stuff we eat at home. Pretty simple. If I'm doing a dinner party, a simple roast or braised meat or something. Nothing fancy. I certainly don't do restaurant dishes at all.

I think your TV audience likes to assume you're having gourmet meals every night.

Chinese, sometimes we'll order pizza. Chefs are notoriously bad eaters. It's this mystique that we go out and have gourmet meals every night. Are you kidding me? I eat steak and cheeseburgers.

You make it look so easy doing all these things — judging Top Chef, running your Craft restaurants, being a Dad — where do you get the time?

How much time do you think I spend on Top Chef versus my regular stuff? I like to see how people view what I do.

Maybe thirty percent?

Top Chef takes one month to shoot. That's the whole season. And I work every other day when we're shooting, so I spend about twenty days doing the whole season. It's a tiny part of my life. But the assumption is that I spend the majority of my time on the show and I'm not a cook anymore. Today, I came home early because we're hosting a dinner party, but other than that I'm in the restaurant.

So when you're not doing Top Chef, what's an average day for you?

An average day if I'm home in New York is usually wake up around seven, hang out with my wife until 10:30, then go to the gym. Then after the gym I'm in my office from noon to around five, then in the kitchen for a few hours, then either doing something at night that's work-related. I'm usually out from about 10:30 to midnight every night. Occasionally, I'm home. So the question of how I do it all? I have a great staff. I have great people. I have a great assistant. My wife is obviously very accommodating, but she has a career herself. I have great people in the restaurant. And the show is not nearly as difficult as it appears to be.

And you're happy?

Oh yeah. I enjoy doing the show for reasons that probably aren't so apparent. I end up meeting a lot of talented chefs I normally wouldn't meet. I don't know if I'd meet the guy who has a restaurant in Maryland, but I meet him on the show and realize the guy's very talented. So that's great.

Do you keep in touch with former contestants?

I stayed close with Harold [Dieterle] from Season 1 because he works in New York and we have a lot of mutual friends. In fact, he goes fishing with me. I've also kept in touch with Tiffani [Faison] from Season 1 who I thought was really talented — every now and then we'll exchange e-mails and I'll occasionally run into her at an event. Sam [Talbot] from Season 2; he lives in New York and we have a lot of mutual friends so I'll occasionally see him out.

If I'm traveling, it's to where I have a restaurant. It's business. If [a former contestant] pops in, we'll have a beer or something. But I try not to. I've never hired anybody who was on the show because I don't want anybody to get the idea that there's favoritism. I try to keep that very separate from my workplace.

We hear there's a Top Chef Desserts coming.

It's called Just Desserts. It's in Top Chef format so it's eight pastry chefs living in a house and competing with elimination once a week. I don't think it will be seventeen cast members, more like ten. I'm not 100% sure of the actual number. They just started casting.

Are you attached to it?

I think so. I may make an on-air appearance but I'm not going to have a prime judge's role on that show. Just like Masters I wouldn't do it because the [contestants] are all friends of mine. They're my peers. I can't judge them. A young chef that's up and coming, fine, but I'm not gonna judge Jonathan Waxman. I've known the guy forever. I couldn't do that to him.

Last question. What do you want for Christmas?

The two things I do outside of cooking and hanging out with family is fish and play guitar. So another guitar or a matched set of Accurate fishing reels. Yeah, the BX 600 Extreme. That would be great.

Hungry yet? Check out three delish recipes from Tom's book, 'Wichcraft:

Meatloaf with Cheddar, Bacon and Tomato Relish

Oatmeal Cream'wich

Gruyère With Caramelized Onions

This article was written by Andrea Zimmerman for Babble.com, the magazine and community for a new generation of parents.

Universal Car Seat Carrier/Snap N' Go

Rather than lugging the car seat, stroller and gear through the airport, a much smarter solution is the all-in-one infant car seat carrier. One of these lightweight carriers will hold your favorite car seat on top (presumably, with baby) and a load of infant accoutrements underneath. Take the baby and the car seat out when you board and fold and check the carrier at the gate. You can pick it up upon departure and wheel everyone out the door. (When the kiddo needs the bigger toddler seat, check out the Sit ‘n' Stroll.)

Get the Kolcraft Universal Infant Seat Carrier at Amazon for $54.96.

Get the Snap N' Go from Amazon for $59.99.

CARES Safety Restraint

What a relief to check the car seat when your toddler reaches twenty-two pounds! Slip the CARES safety restraint into your carry-on and that's all you need until your little one can use the regular airplane seat belt. CARES is the only harness child restraint device that is FAA approved and is adjustable until your child reaches forty-four pounds. Giving you extra security and extra space in your bag makes CARES every parent's best friend.

Get it from Amazon for $70.

Trunki Suitcase For Kids

Not only is this carry-on for kids adorable (we were stopped multiple times on the way to the gate) the Trunki is the most practical kid item we tested. Let your child pack games, books and blanket in their very own suitcase and pull it through the terminal independently. When the little traveler gets tired, they can hop on for a ride. Choose your animal or bright color pattern and go!

Get it from Amazon for $49.99.

FeltTales Storyboard

No mess, no noise — a perfect airplane companion. This felt dress up game even has a handle for easy transport. Whether your kiddos like pirates, princesses or celebrating the Jewish holidays — there's a felt theme for every kid fantasy.

Get it from Babalu for $19.95.

Zoobies Plush Animals

It's a blanket, it's a lovey — it's both! Your baby will be entertained and swaddled by this compact plush toy all at the same time. Zoobies come in many species of animal and sizes but we recommend the baby Hada the Hippo (and she fits nicely in the Trunki).

Get it from Zoobies for $25.

The Gürdle

Especially helpful if you're traveling alone with baby, the Gürdle is a simple strap that streamlines your luggage. Small but strong, one step connects your diaper bag to your suitcase, freeing up that third arm you'll be needing. Available in many colors for easy luggage identifying, see how the Gürdle works here.

Get it from The Gürdle for $29.99

Jill E. Bag

The Jill E. bag serves two purposes — hauling the kid stuff and making you look fabulous. Originally a camera bag, Jill E. realized the potential of expansion and sold us on this bag as travel tool. While you stroll to the gate with the latest design in handbags hanging on your arm, the luscious leather outer is actually hiding the secret weapon — tons of separate compartments to keep snacks, toys, games, crayons and myriad other kid props in their own place.

Get it from Jill E. for $169.99.

Nature Baby Organics Travel Set

Allergist-approved for baby, the Nature Baby Organics travel set includes shampoo, body wash, conditioner, face and body moisturizer and can be used by every member of the family (one set lasts a family of four an entire week). Additionally, you should use the calming lavender aromatherapy spray liberally ? perhaps even on your fellow passengers.?

Get it from Nature Baby Organics for $15.95.

Itzy Ritzy Wet Happened!

When you're doing a ton of a laundry, suddenly keeping the dirty and clean separated en route and return is incredibly important. Toss your soiled baby clothes into the zip up Wet Happened! from Itzy Ritzy and forget about whatever it was that leaked, spilled or squirted all over that onesie. Available in fabulous styles and two sizes, you'll wonder why you never traveled with a wet bag before.

Get it from Itzy Ritzy starting at $17.95.?

Coby Portable DVD Player

If you're lucky your flight will come equipped with a personal TV on every seat. Why take that chance when you can guarantee a happy, occupied child with a portable DVD player? The Coby has traveled many miles with our family and reliably saves the day when all else fails. Travel tip: Pick up never-seen episodes of your child's favorite shows to achieve maximum down time.

Get it from Amazon for $65.99.

Find more:

25 Family Travel Tips

The Best Travel High Chairs

The Family That Never Stopped Traveling

This article was written by April Peveteaux for Babble.com, the magazine and community for a new generation of parents.

"What are you doing?" Jack asked.

"I’m cleaning the bathroom," my husband replied.

Jack twisted his face into a look of concern, "What happened?"

Like any child confronted by an unusual event in a familiar environment, Jack didn’t know what to make of what he saw. The truth is that both of my kids witness housecleaning so infrequently that they consider the very activity evidence that some unfortunate event has occurred.

I rarely clean my house. Walk through my front door on any given day and you are almost certain to find dust collected on the coffee table and book shelves. You’ll spot books and magazines semi-stacked on floors and you might trip over those tiny, goody-bag toys kids gather like treasure. The windowsills between the inside glass panes and outer screens bear dirt deposited by seasonal storms and breezes, the wood floors do not gleam and there are blemishes pockmarking the bathroom mirrors — not to mention traces of toothpaste on the walls of the sink from kids who still haven’t learned to aim their spit in the center of the basin. In short, you will find dirt.

And I don’t care.

When I sat down to write this essay, the first thing I did was open my internet browser. It’s no secret to any parent that time is limited.I thought that I could perform a couple of Google searches, find a list — or several — of reasons why people thought it was so important to maintain a clean house when you have kids, and then refute those reasons one-by-one.

I was, however, surprised by the results of my searches. Site after site offered tips for how to keep a clean house when you have young children, how to get the kids to help you clean, even how to find cleaning inspiration when you have trouble mustering it on your own. But on no site — that I could find — did anyone bother to address the reasons why keeping my house clean should be one of my top maternal priorities in the first place. That’s probably because most people think the point is obvious. But it’s not at all obvious to me.

It’s no secret to any parent that time is limited. Once I’ve devoted six or seven hours of each day to sleeping, I’ve got about thirty hours of goals to squeeze into what’s left of any given day. I need to get the kids to school with all of their accoutrements, shepherd them to their activities, cook their meals, wash, dry, fold and redistribute their clothes, help with their homework, schedule doctors’ appointments and play dates, and so on. As soon as I get the kids out the door, I need to write and do all of the other things this business requires as well as fulfill my volunteer commitments at school, temple and around town. I need to shower and eat. I need to find the cat so I can take her to the vet. The last thing I want to do with any moments I have left over when all of these requirements are complete is clean.

I’d much rather spend time enjoying the company of my husband and my kids than battling with the detritus spawned by my house. I read Harry Potter to my seven-year-old son at bedtime. I listen while my four-year-old daughter takes me on long, sometimes incomprehensible journeys through the complex universe that lives in her mind. I accompany my children on long walks in the local apple orchards in autumn and together we marvel at the glowing reds and ambers of the trees, the hawks we watch as they dive for lunch, the apples we’ve just picked that taste so much sweeter than those we buy at the grocery store. We celebrate my kids’ and my own Jewish heritage every Friday night as we feast on challah I’ve made from scratch for them, we learn to cook and eat bulgogi together to experience a piece of my daughter’s Korean birthright and we share corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day in honor of my husband and my son. We watch movies together. We learn about the world, we play games, we have fun.

And no one in my family ever says to me, "Gee, I wish the house were cleaner."

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, let me assure you: I do have some standards. If I notice that a bathtub or the kitchen sink is truly vile, I clean it — or at least I ask my husband to do it. If the dust balls drifting out from under the couch become large enough to invite possible investigation by the Board of Health, I sweep them up. When the cat pukes— as she does almost daily —I clean it up. I am not a total pig. My kids eat off clean dishes and they wear clean clothes. That’s good enough for me.

I should also clarify that I have no objection to cleanliness itself. If I could, I would hire a cleaning service to come in every week and have them tidy and sanitize and polish the inside of my house until it could pass even my late grandmother’s literal white-glove test.  It’s the process of achieving cleanliness that I despise. Cleaning is tedious and repetitive, and it’s disheartening when you notice the dust regrouping on the piano before you’ve even finished wiping down the other side of the room. I know some people love to clean, including some of my own closest friends and family. (And then there was that Monica-character on Friends. I never understood her.) They find it to be a stress-relief. I find it to be on a par with teeth-cleanings and colonoscopies.

I don’t even do much cleaning for family and friends. I might walk through my house before guests arrive and deal with anything that doesn’t pass my "Is this disgusting?" test. Beyond that, though, I reason that no one wants to be friends with me because of my housekeeping skills or lack thereof. If you’re going to condemn me for the state of my house, then my guess is you’re probably not going to enjoy my company very much in the first place.

As far as I’m concerned, there are countless better ways to spend my time with or without my kids than cleaning. My mudroom may contain actual mud and my countertops may be sticky, but my kids, my husband and I laugh a lot.

And I’ll take that over a clean house any day.

I have changed my children’s names in order to protect their privacy.

Find More:

Bad Parent: I don't babyproof.

Babble Best: Baby Laundry Detergent

BPA: How bad is it?

This article was written by Tracy Hahn-Burkett for Babble.com, the magazine and community for a new generation of parents.

BAA, BAA, BLACK SHEEP

Baa, baa, black sheep,
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
Three bags full;
One for the master,
One for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.

Some researchers believe this rhyme was written simply to encourage young children to imitate the sounds of animals when they are learning how to talk. But there’s a far more interesting and historic background to the poem. The version we all grew up with was, in fact, altered to make it more pleasant for young ears. The poem had a different last line until at least 1765, when it was included in Mother Goose’s Melody, published by John Newbery. The last line originally went like this: "And none for the little boy who cries in the lane."

The surprising story behind this rhyme starts, unsurprisingly enough, with sheep. Sheep have been extremely valuable to the English economy for well over a thousand years. The wool trade in England was already thriving by August 1086 when the Domesday Book recorded that many flocks across the country numbered more than two thousand sheep. By the late twelfth century, sheep farming was big business and towns such as Guildford, Northampton, Lincoln, and York had become thriving centers of production. By 1260, some flocks consisted of as many as seven or eight thousand sheep, each tended by a dozen full-time shepherds, and English wool was regarded as the best in the world. But as the cloth workers of Belgium and France were far more skilled than the English at producing the finished article, much of the wool produced was exported to Europe, where the raw material was dyed and woven into high-quality cloth.

When Edward I returned from his crusading in 1272 to be crowned king, he set about the type of reforms his father, Henry III, had been unable to achieve. England had a growing number of wealthy wool merchants, chiefly in the form of the monasteries, and thanks to the quality and reliability of English wool, an increasing number of eager buyers in the Italians and the Flemish, who dominated European business at the time. Naturally this also led to a growing number of traders and exporters and a great deal of money flowing into England on a regular basis. This, in turn, meant Edward was able to impose new taxes on the exports of wool to fund his military campaigns and keep the royal coffers topped up. In 1275, the Great Custom was introduced in the shape of a royal tax of six shillings and eight pence per wool sack — approximately one-third of the price of each sack. It was this wool tax that is said to be the basis of "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep": one-third of the price of each sack must go to the king (the master), two-thirds to the Church or the monasteries (the dame), and none to the actual shepherd (the little boy who cries in the lane). Rather than being a gentle song about sharing things out fairly, it’s a bitter reflection on how unfair things have always been for working folk throughout history.

During this period of great success (for the ruling classes, at any rate), England’s export of wool nearly doubled from 24,000 sacks to 47,000 sacks per year, and the money raised largely funded the Hundred Years’ War with the French that dominated the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. To this day, the Lord Speaker in the House of Lords (successor to the Lord Chancellor’s role) sits on a sack made of wool, first introduced during the fourteenth century by the third consecutive Edward to rule England, Edward III.

RUB-A-DUB-DUB

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three men in a tub,
And how do you think they got there?
The butcher, the baker, and candlestick maker,
It was enough to make a man stare.

This is one of those nursery rhymes that we all take for granted. When looked at again, it’s a very much odder affair. At first glance, "Rub-a-Dub-Dub" looks rather like a reference to a gay peep show. Indeed, history reveals that there probably was such a thing, catering especially for royalty and the nobility. There is every chance the working classes also had their own clandestine man-on-man entertainment going on in towns and cities throughout the land. However, the oldest printed version of the rhyme, dating to the fifteenth century, reveals how changing just a few words can alter a story completely, putting an entirely different complexion on it:

Rub-a-dub-dub,
Three maids in a tub,
And who do you think were there?
The butcher, the baker and candlestick maker,
And all of them gone to the fair.

Peep shows were popularized by the Victorians during the nineteenth century, but their origins can be traced back much further, to Europe in the 1400s. In those days, wandering artists and entertainers came up with the idea of presenting their art or shows in a large portable wooden box. The inside could be decorated to create scenery and customers would pay to watch the action through holes in the side. It was all innocent fun in the beginning but soon developed into the perfect way of providing "closet" sexual entertainment for the public without breaking too many laws. That was probably when those Victorians became so interested in them.

RING-A-RING O’ ROSES

Ring-a-ring o’ roses,
A pocketful of posies;
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.

This rhyme usually accompanies a dancing game that ends with all the children falling to the ground, getting their clothes muddy, and going home to a smack upside the head. Or at least that’s how I remember it.

"Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses" is traditionally associated with the plague — the Great Plague of London in 1665 or the Black Death of the late 1340s — and it is easy to see why. A plague victim would show early symptoms of the disease in the form of red, circular rashes all over the body resembling wreaths of roses (Ring-a-ring o’ roses). The rhyme also seems to reflect the superstition that if a person was to carry around a pouch, or "pocket," stuffed with herbs or "posies," there was less chance of infection (A pocketful of posies). Sneezing would be also be a symptom (A-tishoo! A-tishoo!), indicating that the person was in an advanced state of infection, certain to fall down (dead) very shortly afterward. So far so neat.

Unfortunately this doesn’t actually accord with the known symptoms of the disease. Between two and six days following infection, the illness becomes obvious in a person. The early signs are headaches, chills, high fever. No rosy rings. Following the fever would come the formation of buboes, an inflammatory swelling of the lymph glands in both the groin and armpits. There is no historical record that posies, herbs, or any other flower were used as preventive medicine, although there is evidence that sweet-smelling flowers were sometimes carried to counter the terrible odors in areas affected by disease. (People were so terrified of catching the plague, in fact, that they are known to have resorted to extreme measures — burning all their clothes, possessions, and sometimes even their houses in the hope of avoiding infection.) And finally, there is no reference anywhere to sneezing as a final and fatal symptom of the plague.

One of the strongest arguments given for the rhyme being connected with the plague is, in fact, one of the strongest arguments against it. Several historians have urged in favor of the association. But the big question is this: if indeed the rhyme dates as far back as the Black Death in the 1340s, then why did nobody write it down for over five hundred years?

No contemporary record of the rhyme has been found from that period. Even Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), the noted diarist and chronicler of a later outbreak, the Great Plague, makes no mention of it, although it seems unlikely that no record should be made until 1881, centuries after it was — seemingly — first sung. In fact, no connection had been made between "Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses" and either of the plagues until 1961, when James Leasor proposed the idea in his book The Plague and the Fire.

In conclusion, while the connection between rhyme and plague makes a good story, it appears far more likely that "Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses" is a simple children’s party game, illustrating nothing more than a group holding hands in a circle and dancing around, to the accompaniment of satisfying sound effects (A-tishoo! A-tishoo!) and actions (We all fall down). In its first publication in Britain, in 1881 — in Kate Greenaway’s Mother Goose — the sneezing wasn’t even part of the rhyme, perhaps suggesting a later addition:

Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Hush! hush! hush! hush!
We’re all tumbled down.

The version in Alice Gomme’s Dictionary of British Folklore (1898) reads:

Ring a ring of roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Upstairs, downstairs,
In my lady’s chamber.

While, as late as 1949, a version included in a collection of verse entitled Poems of Early Childhood — illustrated with four happy children dancing in a circle and carrying bunches of roses — still carries no reference to the fatal sneezing:

Ring a ring a rosy,
A pocket full of posies;
One, two, three, four,
We all fall down.

HUMPTY DUMPTY

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

The real Humpty Dumpty was a powerful cannon used by the Royalist forces during the English Civil War of 1642–51. Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle led the king’s men and overpowered the Parliament strong-hold of Colchester early in 1648. They grimly held on to it while the Parliamentarians, led by Thomas Fairfax, encircled and besieged the town in what became known as the Siege of Colchester. The supporters of Charles I almost won the day — all thanks to his doughtiest defender, Humpty Dumpty. In pole position, as it were, on top of the church tower of Saint Mary-at-the-Walls, One-Eyed Thompson, the gunner, managed to blast away the attacking Roundhead troops with rousing success for eleven whole weeks. That is, until the top of the church tower was eventually blown away, sending Humpty Dumpty crashing to the ground outside the city wall, where it buried itself in deep marshland. The king’s cavalry (the horses) and the infantry (the men) hurried to retrieve the cannon in order to repair it, but they couldn’t put Humpty together again, and without their weapon of mass destruction, they were soon overrun by Fairfax and his soldiers.

There are another two verses preceding the better-known one that tell the tale in more detail:
In sixteen hundred and forty-eight,
When England suffered the pains of state,
The Roundheads laid siege to Colchester town
Where the king’s men still fought for the crown.

There One-Eyed Thompson stood on the wall,
A gunner of deadliest aim of all.
From Saint Mary’s Tower his cannon he fired,
Humpty Dumpty was its name.

Written in the same vein as "Hitler Has Only Got One Ball" (a song mocking the Nazis that raised the British spirits during the darker days of World War II), "Humpty Dumpty" was a piece of propaganda that passed from town to town as the news of the king’s defeat spread across England and the Parliamentarian troops slowly returned home, teaching even their youngest children to recite the tale of their victory.

But if the rhyme is entirely military in origin, how come we all think of Humpty Dumpty as an egg? The answer to that question is found in the late nineteenth century in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass (1871). Sir John Tenniel’s iconic illustration shows Alice in deep discussion with Humpty Dumpty as he sits upon a high wall. Tenniel, clearly taken with the idea of the impossibility of Humpty Dumpty’s being put back together again once he’d fallen off the wall, has him shaped as an egg with short arms and legs. This is the first known depiction of Humpty as an egg, one that was to become the definitive image.

— Pretty on the Inside?

Dear Pretty,

Yours is a very common concern. In fact, it's so common we have already answered a similar question.

As we discussed in that column, there's no reason to believe that your son's facial particularities will be extreme or unattractive later in life. He's only twenty-three weeks! That little half-baked face will change as he grows, and it's not going to expand exponentially at precisely the same angles.

Believe us, we know; we both had the exact same fears during our pregnancies. One of us spent months wondering whether her daughter was going to come out looking like one of the Simpsons. Okay, she might have made a pretty good Maggie early on, and we're not expecting to escape without orthodontics. But the overbite we fretted about in utero has turned out to be part of what makes her cute. More so, it's part of what makes her HER.

We don't know what the ultrasound technician was thinking when she opted to comment on your son's features. Maybe she thought she was complimenting him (one woman's hawk is another woman's aquiline). Maybe she has some deep subconscious resentment or envy of sharp noses leftover from her childhood. Who knows? Whatever was going on in her head, she probably should have kept her mouth shut. Every flicker of the eyeball on the face of an ultrasound technician can trigger waves of anxiety in the person on the table.

Ultrasound technology has lots of advantages — and sometimes makes people feel more bonded to their fetuses — but it can also freak us out. We're looking through a tiny, blurry windowpane into a work in progress. A completely random comment can easily be interpreted as disastrous.  There's no reason to feel guilty. You, like every pregnant woman who's come before you, are just hoping that things turn out okay for your kid. This episode has suddenly focused that well-intentioned desire entirely upon the possibly imperfect curvature of a prenatal nose. Do your best to put the technician's loaded, but ultimately meaningless, words out of your head.

Perhaps you should do the same with those premature baby pictures. If they're giving you anxiety, there's no reason to scrutinize them or even look at them. We've come to think it's important to see our babies' images before birth, but is it really? Parents have been perfectly well attached to their babies for centuries before we started giving them those tiny blurry photocopies to hug and hold beforehand. This snapshot is a moment in time, at a time when your baby is far from fully developed. You've probably seen snapshots of yourself that highlight features you'd rather not focus on. Imagine if your appearance were being judged solely on one moment's image, and a glowing negative skeletal silhouette at that?!

Babies are engineered for cuteness to ensure that the adults around them give them the care they need. Fetuses enjoy no such evolutionary benefits. Give him some time. Your baby may not be quite ready for his close up yet, but we're betting that a few months down the line, the magic of twinkling eyes and baby fat will have you wondering . . . why you ever worried.

Oh, and for what it's worth, that nose doesn't look particularly prominent to us. 

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com

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Jane Jetson, The Jetsons

If the Real Housewives went animated, doting Jane (with the live-in help of maid/nanny/pseudo-mom Robot Rosey) would no doubt be given a starring role. We're not so stoked that she makes the rest of Mom-kind look bad in the creative dinner department, and sigh, her orange hair always looks coiffed, but boy, does she dote on Judy and Elroy.

Betty Rubble, The Flintstones

Betty finds an abandoned infant at her doorstop one day, and BOOM. No question about it, takes little Bamm-Bamm in as her own, even going to court against legendary "Perry Masonry" to win custody of her baby boy. Such a good adoptive momma, that Betty — we're willing to look past the annoying giggle.

Bambi's Mom, Bambi

Still chokes us up to this day to think about Bambi's dad telling his son, "Your mother can no longer be with you." Any mom who risks death to protect her four-legged offspring earns a "Mother of the Year Award" in our books. Sniff.

Mama Bear, Berenstain Bears

Really, is there a life lesson this wise, furry momma didn't teach her two mischievous cubs? Handling pressure, staying safe, living by the golden rule? The list goes on. Oh, and she manages to balance parent and social time quite impressively: she's a whiz at quilt-making and president of the Bear Country Garden Club.

Mother Bear, Little Bear

Oh, Mother Bear. You are so kind and sweet and soft-spoken. You must have some alternate wacked-out personality. Except you don't. And even though you're so nicey-nice it makes us want to choke on our kid's animal crackers sometimes, we appreciate that your bear humming calms them down when they're watching the tube.

Mrs. Jumbo, Dumbo

Like any good mom, Mrs. Jumbo sticks up for her floppy-eared son when the rest of the elephants poke fun of his large ears — even getting imprisoned by the circus folk for her outburst. Need we even mention the heart-wrenching mother/son trunk nuzzling scene? Too much.

Miss Spider, Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends

The warm spider with the big blue eyes is the epitome of a loving mother. She treats all her Sunny Patch kids equal and instills wholesome values like, "We have to be good to bugs, all bugs." Right on.

Wilma Flintstone, The Flintstones

The level-headed matriarch of the Flintstone clan, Wilma maintains a clean home and family sanity for baby Pebbles. Not an easy task, when you've got an elephant vacuum cleaner and a husband like Fred. Plus, does she look fab in pearls or what?

Didi Pickles, Rugrats

Sure, she's a tad overprotective of her son, Tommy, but frizzy-haired Didi sure means well in the Mom department. And we can't fault her for heeding every piece of Dr. Lipschitz parenting advice she can get her hands on.

Martha Generic, Bobby's World

She's got that universal mom quality: eyes in the back of her head! (Which, of course, come in quite handy when disciplining goofball Bobby.) Plus, it's quite entertaining to hear her spew motherly advice in that Upper Midwestern "gee golly" accent.

Nanny, Muppet Babies

We may never see her face, but her distinctive pink skirt and striped socks hold court over the Muppet nursery. Let's face it — any lady who can quiet the likes of Gonzo, Kermit and the gang simply by walking in the room has some serious mamma powers.

Grammi Gummi, Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears

The matriarch of the Gummi Clan, she possesses the traits of all great moms: maternal, but means business when she has to. Plus, she's got a signature Mom dish — her famous gummiberry juice!

Rebecca Cunningham, TaleSpin

Representin' the single mammas, stubborn, all- business Rebecca not only watches over her daughter Molly, but also plays step-mom to orphan Kit and keeps lazy Baloo in-line. That can't be easy for one lady.

Fairy Godmother, Cinderella

So she's technically not a mom, per se, but she saves little Cindy from the wrath of her evil stepmother with some pretty spectacular magical powers. Imagine: Bibbity-bobbity-boo! Clean diaper!

Marge Simpson, The Simpsons

She owns her Mom-ness and her sexiness. Yep, the scratchy-voiced, blue-haired mamacita bared all for Playboy, and still manages to be the voice of reason in a yellow family full of dysfunction. Plus, years after it went out of style, Marge still makes the retro beehive look rockin'.

]]>Babble http://www.babble.com/facebook-common-parenting-pitfalls/What was once the domain of rowdy college co-eds has now become a centralized hub for new parents. You can't so much as check your status updates without seeing some adorable tyke smiling a toothless grin or a parent giving the latest update on what their little genius is up to today. With everyone from Dr. Sears to CafeMom hanging up their FB shingle, it seems this former bastion of social networking cool has been taken over entirely by parents — oftentimes with mixed results. Here are the five biggest offenders. — Elina Furman

The Bragger Parent

As the most popular type of parent, this category has trapped even the most well-meaning moms and dads. While your progeny may have walked early, used an adverb correctly or even commented on the recent health care debate, does everyone really need to hear about it? Sure, occasional bragging is part of the parental bill of rights, but abuse of this privilege can be met with swift exclusion from friend lists. And though your pals would not mention anything to your face, you can tell by your ever-waning wall activity that it's time to put a lid on it.

The Whiner Parent

Baby been keeping you up all night? Spitting up his food? Won't go poopy on the potty? Say hello to the Whiner Parent. Always complaining about their sleep and happiness deprivation, you'd think these parents and their colicky offspring had a monopoly on the crying game. While it's okay to occasionally post an FB rant to gain much-needed sympathy and even advice from other veteran parent pals, if you're always complaining prepare to lose some Facebook friends and fast.

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The Cool Parent

Oh, the good old halcyon days of all-night clubbing and indie rock concerts. Those were good times. The problem is they're over and have been replaced with broken sleep cycles and Laurie Berkner concerts. While many parents have changed their wild ways with the arrival of their precious, others refuse to alter their lifestyle or sacrifice their hipness, using Facebook to affirm their undying alternative ways. Expect to see lots of postings for concert attendance, plaintive invites to loft parties and recounts of nights on the town. And while these parents may in fact be having fun, they're really not fooling anyone.

The Obsessed Parent

Obsessed parents and Facebook go together like peas and pods. After all, where else can these hyper-consumed parents find such a captive audience for their myriad of photos, videos and announcements? This type of parent has completely given up their Facebook identity to their offspring, sticking their baby's photos smack dab where their own used to be. Of course, if you're going to be obsessed with your baby, Facebook is as good a place as any — beats whipping out your iPhone baby pics at parties.

The Zen Parent

"Oh, this little thing? It's just my thirty-pound toddler that I lug around on my back. Is he heavy? No, quite light actually. It's really much easier than it looks." The Zen parent is a relatively new phenomenon brought about by sustainable living and attachment parenting philosophies and they are multiplying by the droves. Common posts include pithy aphorisms about the joys of parenting and the general beauty of the world. Based on their posts, you'd think their babies have never shed a tear in their life. Yeah, we get it. Life is great. Babies are wonderful. Being a mom is the best thing you've ever done. Bleary-eyed parents with spit up on your shirts take note: Their babies are probably pooping their pants even as you read.

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I slip into a black carrier, strap the baby in, make sure she's snug, put a hat over her tiny head, then head out. A woman with a baby on her hip? So common most people wouldn't notice. But a man, by himself, with a baby on his chest, bobbing and bouncing with every step?  Before I might have been invisible to the world. Now people look twice. Tough guys on the corner smirk, sometimes laugh. Ladies behind the donut counter wave. Security guards soften their glare and grin. Pretty women stop to talk. Old men smile. 

When I wear the baby strangers in markets and bakeries and subway stations stop to ask questions, make weird baby talk, or serenade my daughter. People tell me what I'm doing is "wonderful." Flooded with waves of attention and praise, I might momentarily lose myself and forget that I'm just doing what I'm supposed to: being a father to my child. 

But our culture sees it differently:  a man, alone with his baby — even in 2009 — is somewhat rare and unexpected. One reason for this: most men have little opportunity to take an extended leave from work shortly after their babies are born. Within days or weeks of a child's birth, most new dads are back at work.

For me, deciding to take paternal leave last September to be with Isabella, my four-month-old daughter, was easy. I knew I wanted to spend time with her once my wife's unpaid four-month maternity leave ended. We didn't want to put her in daycare so early. And my company's paternal leave policy was unusually generous — six weeks paid, plus any available sick time, up to four months. So the question for me wasn't whether to take paternity leave, but how much? That, it turned out, was the tricky part.

Few men in the American workplace take paternal leave. In part, this trend reflects America's stingy attitude towards family leave. According to a Harvard University report, of 173 industrialized countries studied, 169 guarantee paid maternal leave for women. The U.S. — along with Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland — is among the four nations that offer nothing. Moreover, 66 of 173 countries guarantee paid paternal leave; the U.S. does not.

In the U.S., family leave benefits remain at the employers' discretion. As a result of the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, men and women working for organizations with fifty or more employees are entitled to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave to spend with a newborn child without risk of losing their jobs. Few men, however, can afford to lose two or three months salary. Especially if their wives or partners may also be taking unpaid maternity leave. 

Only thirteen percent of U.S. employers offer paid paternal leave to allow men to spend time at home with a new baby, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Even when the opportunity exists only fifty-eight percent of men opt to use paid paternal leave available to them.

Armin Brott, author of The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-be and The New Father, suggests that men often struggle with the balance between work and family roles. "Most new fathers," Brott writes, "feel torn between two options that feel mutually exclusive: protecting and providing, and being an involved, nurturing dad."

"There is still a lot of fear among people," Brott says, "that they aren't going to make partner, they aren't going to get a promotion, they won't be taken seriously in their job . . . and to some extent, they're right."

Considering all this, is it any wonder that less than ten percent of American men take more than two weeks off from work to spend with a newborn baby?

And still, some do.

George Estrada, 38, a project manager from Fairfax, Virginia, who worked for USA Today in 2001, was one of the first men in his department to take advantage of his company's paternal leave policy. Before his son's birth he went to his manager and proposed taking seven weeks off after his wife returned to work from maternity leave. His request perplexed his supervisor who said, "I don't think that's available to you. That's only for moms."  After Estrada explained the company's policy to her, she remained unconvinced. "Well," she said, "I don't think we can do that." The newspaper thought otherwise and granted Estrada his leave.

Haven Perez, 39, a PhD student in Los Angeles, considered his options as the birth of his first child, Lorelei, approached. Her arrival prompted him to take time off from his job while his wife continued to work full time as a registered nurse. His decision didn't lead to a flustered manager, but rather, his own mother's skepticism. "Maybe," his mother asked, "a woman would have more patience?"

When it came to my job, I had recently been promoted to a management position. But more than that, I would be the first to really use our company's paternal leave policy. No man at my workplace had taken paternity leave except for a couple weeks immediately following a baby's birth. Nobody could provide advice, tell me how it went, or give me a sense of how people would react. Having already taken three weeks leave after the baby was born, most of my co-workers assumed I was done with time away from work with the baby. I worried about how colleagues, co-workers and my staff would react to my second extended absence. Would my decision to take leave let down co-workers or burden them with additional work or stress? Or, worse, might everyone cruise along just fine exposing me as unnecessary or redundant?

Ultimately, I opted to take one month of full leave, followed by two weeks working part-time, coming into the office only in the mornings. I wasn't sure if the decision was bold or cowardly: some men have taken much longer paternal leaves but most new fathers take much less time, or none at all. My boss, a father of three, was supportive, but reactions from co-workers ranged from modestly encouraging ("Makes sense? good for you?") to puzzled ("You're going to be out how long?) to misinformed ("Wow, a six-week vacation!") to passive-aggressively derisive ("We'll muddle through while you're off doing your thing.").

For Estrada, Perez, and myself — along with thousands of men in similar situations across the country who shrug off doubts and take paternity leave ? the experience often meets resistance from within the workplace and our culture. It suggests that America still isn't quite sure what to make of the balance between work and family, especially for men. In most modern workplaces, maternity leave, even if unpaid, is fairly common and uncontroversial. But a man, taking extended paternal leave months after a baby is born? In many offices, that idea is nothing short of radical. 

On the morning that I began my leave my wife left the house in tears. It would be her first time away from Isabella for more than a few hours since she was born. And for me, this day would be the first time Isabella and I would be alone together for more than a few hours. 

"You're going to sing to her, right?" My wife asked, standing at the door, in her black business suit, sobbing, "Promise me."

"All day," I said. "I promise."

And then she left. I held Isabella in the crook of my left arm and we peered trough the window together, watching her walk down the street, turn left, and vanish out of sight. Isabella sighed and looked up at me, her brow furrowed curiously, as if to ask, "Okay, now what?"

Men who take paternal leave often discover that the difficulties of getting and taking time off from their jobs pale in comparison with the challenges of caring for an infant on their own, often for the first time.  

Joshua Taylor, 36, a press secretary for a member of Congress, began an eight-week paternal leave after his wife returned to work this winter. He found himself unprepared for the effort and energy required to care for his four-month-old son, Will. He struggled to keep up with the schedule and routines his wife and baby had established during their first months together. "I hadn't changed as many dirty diapers as I thought I had," he said. Taylor also found it hard to break free from his Blackberry addiction and the impulse to constantly check email that kept him connected with his job. "It's difficult to disengage," Taylor said.

Estrada, on leave from USA Today, bristled at some puzzled reactions from other men when he was out with the baby in the middle of the day. "A lot of them were just looking at me like 'What are you doing?'"  Far worse than the reactions of other men, he soon found himself dealing with a sick baby, gripped with doubts about his competence to handle the situation. "I was a basket case. I was thinking the worst," Estrada said. "I was thinking, 'He's gonna die on me!'"

My time alone with Isabella wasn't quite as difficult of a transition. Maybe I was lucky. Once I was away the significance of my promotion, my projects, and reactions of co-workers evaporated. Instead, for a few weeks, at least, it was just my increasingly smiley daughter and me for most of each day. She was exploring the world for the first time. I was her tour guide. 

We walked through gardens, strolled parks with our dog, cruised museums together, visited her mother for lunch, browsed furniture at Ikea, bought fresh bread at Eastern Market and watched NBA playoff games together when neither of us could sleep. I cheered her on as she flipped from her stomach to her back for the first time. When she was hungry, I gave her a bottle. When she was in the bath, I told her stories from old comic books and my favorite movies. When she cried I danced for her, put her on my shoulders, or quite often, as promised, I sang.

Despite the initial stress and the steep learning curve many fathers find the experience of paternal leave deeply rewarding. With the average American getting fewer than three weeks vacation time every year, fathers often find few opportunities beyond weekends and holidays to spend significant amounts of time alone, bonding with their children, especially during early, formative years. Strange as it sounds, a month or two alone with a new child may be a father's last chance at anything like it.

"I'm never going to get these days again," Estrada said. "There's going to be a day when these kids look at us and we're not going to be cool . . . they're going to be rebelling, and it's going to be another period until they come back. Why am I going to waste that?"

Early bonding with a baby leads to tangible benefits as well. The physical act of "wearing" an infant leads to babies who cry less, grow better, learn more, and communicate most effectively, according to Dr. William Sears, a pediatrician, father of eight children, and author of several bestselling books on parenting. His research suggests that the physical experience of "wearing" a baby in a sling or a carrier can foster a closer bond between a father and child, an attachment that can form the foundation of a close lifelong relationship. "The time in your arms is a relatively short time in the total life of your child," Sears writes, "but the memories of your touch and availability will last a lifetime."

Brott's research echoes this, suggesting that time spent between a father and baby early lead to lasting, long-term benefits. "The earlier dads get involved, their better off they're going to be, the more involved they're going to be with their kids later on."

"If you've done the diaper-changing and the bathing, and the basic stuff that seems kind of frightening if you've never done it before; you get a level of comfort," Brott adds. "That's what relationships are built on."

On one of the final days of my leave Isabella and I headed out for one of our last daytime outings. On Monday, I would be back at work. She would be in day care.

The sign read: "Movie Mom's Club," so I knew I was in the right place.

I pulled open the door and wheeled Isabella down the dim corridor in her stroller. As we rolled into the theater, we passed a dozen strollers parked to the right of the front row of seats. In the darkness, I looked up and saw the faces of dozens of young women and children, glowing with the flickering blue and white light of the movie screen. Some women sat in pairs, bouncing infants on their laps. Another mom was walking alongside her toddler in the aisle as he stumbled his way slowly down the steps. One sat in the back row, nursing her baby. Lots of eyes followed us as we crossed the theater and parked next to an open seat in the front row. By now, I was used to drawing attention. "Yes," I thought to myself, "Daddy's crashing the Movie Mom Matinee . . . deal with it, ladies!"

Isabella, unaware of the attention we attracted, stared up at the twenty-foot screen transfixed with the dancing and music of Mamma Mia, her mouth open in awe and wonder, her eyes wide with delight. As I watched her sitting there, happily wobbling, her eyes aglow with the swirling colors and motion of her very first movie, it seemed hard to believe anyone might miss a moment like this. It occurred to me that I would probably miss many more of her "firsts," but not this one.

Moms with OCD have visions of stabbing, drowning or suffocating the baby repeatedly throughout the day. Along with fears of contamination or rigid ideas about feeding or bathing, these images pop into their minds over and over. A mom might pick up a knife to cut broccoli and think, "What if I . . . " Merrill Sparago, a Los Angeles psychiatrist who specializes in helping women in pregnancy and postpartum, says that almost all new moms have bizarre thoughts, but for moms with OCD they are repeated and intrusive. After awhile, the mom begins to doubt herself, worrying that if she's thinking this way she might actually be capable of following through.

Moms with postpartum OCD hide the kitchen knives, or avoid the baby as much as possible, fearing that they might act on a disturbing thought. But according to Sparago, these moms are not dangerous. Postpartum psychosis ? a separate disorder in which a mom loses touch with reality and her aggressive thoughts seem logical to her ? requires immediate medical attention. This was the diagnosis in the famous case of Andrea Yates, who drowned her children in the bathtub because she believed she was saving them from evil. In contrast to this, the very fact that a woman with OCD is bothered by her thoughts and wants them to go away means she's no more likely to hurt her baby than any other mom.

James Swain, a scientist at the University of Michigan, says that a new parent's brain is wired for anxiety. He argues that having a certain level of this emotion in the post partum is evolutionarily adaptive ? it has helped us keep our babies out of harm's way for thousands of years. Swain and other researchers at Yale found that, even for a normal parent, the sound of a crying baby triggered brain regions associated with anxiety and OCD. The problem with the full-blown disorder is that a woman becomes stuck in thought patterns that are no longer adaptive and disturbing thoughts or fears become caught in the obsessive-compulsive machinery.

Not surprisingly, a mom with OCD is likely to keep her thoughts to herself, fearing that the rest of the world, or even her partner, might think she is crazy. Sparago stresses that the correct diagnosis is key (distinguishing OCD from post partum depression or psychosis), because the treatment that follows will be tailored to the mom's needs. Along with medication, cognitive behavioral therapy helps moms slowly approach their fears. The key is to separate the obsessions from a mom's self-concept. "It takes a long time to convince a mom with OCD that she's not crazy," says Sparago, "and to accept that her thoughts are the fault of the disease ? she is not a bad person."

If you think you might need support during your pregnancy or postpartum, help and information is available through Post Partum Support International.

You see, my daughter, Chloe, is a strict vegetarian. She's never tasted a hot dog, seen the inside of a McDonalds, or stepped within twenty feet of a supermarket deli counter. The reason is simple: twenty-two years ago, I swore off meat entirely. Call it what you will — my pledge to the animal kingdom or a fit of teenage rebellion. Either way, it felt right, and from that day on I haven't had so much as a fish stick.

So when my daughter Chloe came along, I hadn't a clue how to marinate, tenderize, heck — identify — a slab of meat. In a fit of new mother guilt, I pored over medical journals and parenting magazines in search of proof that my meatless ways would render my cherubic-faced child a protein-deprived, iron-deficient waif. But all the research pointed to the same conclusion: with the right mix of nutrients and supplements, I could raise a perfectly healthy child on a strict vegetarian diet. Even my husband, a committed carnivore, agreed to go along for the ride, sanctioning Chloe's meat-free existence on the condition that she be free to switch to the dark side if the urge arose.

Little did I realize, that dark side would arrive sooner than expected. When I informed Chloe's pre-school teacher the very first day of class that my daughter is a strict vegetarian, she snapped her gum and responded: "Oh, okay. But she can still eat chicken and fish, right?" I almost fainted.

But ill-informed teachers aren't my only adversaries. I'm also squaring off against an army of three-year-olds lugging lunchboxes chock full of Chloe contraband. What sort of chance does marinated tofu and mango-flecked quinoa stand against deep-fried chicken fingers? Since her birth, I've imagined sitting my young daughter down for a deep philosophical conversation about animal rights. But I figured I had seven or eight years to prep for The Talk. All of a sudden, Chloe's out of arm's reach and surrounded by ravenous toddlers threatening to undo years of work.

And hard work it's been. Raising a vegetarian daughter takes more than loading a diaper bag with hummus and cracker snack packs. Nursery rhymes alone are enough to render the task a full-time job. From "three blind mice getting their tails cut off by a butcher knife" to the kid who "loses his poor meatball when somebody sneezed," I've had to ad lib my way through countless sing-songs. Even Dr. Seuss seemed to have it in for me, what, with his heaping platefuls of green eggs and ham.

But censorship has been the least of my challenges. You try explaining to a Filipina babysitter that shrimp paste isn't a vegetable. I've traveled enough to know that in some parts of the world, the very concept of vegetarianism is incomprehensible. Some people simply don't have the luxury of refusing dinner entrees — not when half the population lives below the poverty line. I get it. But that cultural divide hasn't stopped me from doing things I'm not proud of, like checking Chloe's breath for wafts of hamburger when she comes home from play dates.

Sadder than treating my toddler as if she were some bleary-eyed teenager stumbling through the door after an AC/DC concert is the fact that I seem to be going it alone these days. You'd think that the medical community would show me some love with studies revealing staggering obesity rates among toddlers. Instead, I spend my days fielding e-mails from my father containing links to articles entitled, "Iron Deficiency Anemia." Even the normally stone-cold nurse at our pediatrician's office burst into gales of laughter when a routine check-up revealed that Chloe is a die-hard vegetarian — as if it were a role reserved for hemp-wearing, patchouli-loving adolescents.

Yes, raising a vegetarian toddler is tough. But why shouldn't I want my daughter eating a healthy and cruelty-free diet — even if it makes her different from her classmates? It's just that these days, fending off weird bacteria strains and schoolyard cliques seems so much simpler than battling bologna sandwiches.

"The only real concern I had was that our diet choice would be scrutinized by our social worker and possibly jeopardize or complicate the adoption, but it wasn't and didn't," the Sacramento mom recalled.

Engebretson is fast discovering that raising a vegetarian child isn't merely an offshoot of her own twenty-one-year history of not eating meat but a national trend. A study by the CDC released last year showed one out of every two hundred kids in America follows a vegetarian diet. If you're talking specifically about teenagers, the CDC says multiply that number by anywhere from four to six.

In the era of The Omnivore's Dilemma and Food, Inc., more parents in 2009 are putting meats on par with high fructose corn syrup.

The correlation is fair, says Dr. Joanna Dolgoff, a specialist in child and adolescent weight management. Meats are notoriously high in saturated fats, so a diet devoid of burgers and steaks is tantamount to a lower risk factor for elevated cholesterol levels. Replacing the meats and high-fat animal products with whole grains, legumes, vegetables, nuts and fruits may also decrease the risk of elevated blood cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, obesity and other diseases such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.

"The challenges are getting enough protein, B vitamins, reducing the amount of processed foods and unhealthy carbohydrates consumed and overall not getting a well-balanced diet," says Dolgoff.

Studies on the affects of a vegetarian diet for children have varied widely. A 1980 study in Boston tried to pose a link between children abstaining from meat and higher intelligence, but it was largely discounted as correlation rather than causation because the families studied were found to have higher education levels than the average American family. Others have posited vegetarian children fall lower on the percentile charts then their peers in terms of height and weight. The former can be true — if kids aren't getting appropriate nutrition. Vegans are at a higher risk for iron deficiencies, and the high fiber diets of vegetarian kids have to be carefully balanced to ensure children aren't filling themselves on fiber and missing out on proteins, calcium and other vitamins.

As for the latter, dieticians are fast to warn people away from the assumption that vegetarianism is a low-fat option. "A child could be a vegetarian and consume a very nutrient-poor diet that is predominately junk food," explains Michelle May, author of Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: How to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle. "I would caution parents of preteens and teenage girls to be on the lookout for signs of an eating disorder. Be mindful of the possibility that their child, particularly girls, is using the excuse of a vegetarian diet to limit her caloric intake."

Of course, all of the problems — the need to balance appropriate amounts of nutrients, the need to ensure kids are eating enough but not eating too much — come with "mainstream eaters" too, says Elizabeth Ward, a registered dietician and author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Feeding Your Baby and Toddler.

Fortunately, the majority of parents who are embarking on raising a vegetarian child are already vegetarians themselves. It would stand to reason that they know what they're getting into and how to construct a healthy meat-free diet.

Joan Hobbs, a Boulder, Colo. mom, had been a vegetarian for five years by the time she gave birth to her first child in 1989. Her husband hadn't eaten meat in close to two decades. "We didn't even consider feeding her any other way," Hobbs says. It was a practice that would follow with their next two kids. All three are active athletes, and today their eldest, who went through her teens a competitive gymnast, is still a vegetarian.

"We didn't really have any concerns," Hobbs notes. "We ate a well-balanced diet, probably a bit heavy on the cheese, and we were both healthy so we knew that you didn't need to eat meat, fish or chicken to live well and thrive." The Hobbses were also wise enough to reach out to healthcare professionals when they had a concern, including their daughter's sports physician.

That's the biggest stumbling block for most parents, Ward said, whether they are vegetarian at the time of their child's birth and planning this for their child's future or their middle schooler comes home one day and announces they don't want to see another chicken leg on their plate. "Adults can get away with a lot in terms of sub-optimal eating, but kids can't," Ward says. "You just really have to bone up on what that child needs."

Again it's something Ward would say to parents she'd term "mainstream eaters" — learning to adjust a diet to meet the needs of a growing child.

It's likewise the reason not every vegetarian parent decides to raise their child without meat. Tanya Cohen, a mom of one from New York, hasn't eaten a strictly vegetarian diet in the past two years, but even before daughter Gabby was born, she was what's called a flexeterian: she phased out meats, starting with the red meats, but ate fish and chicken. But Gabby, now five, is purely omnivorous.

"Quite simply, she loves her meat, just like Daddy," Cohen explains. "I don't want to deprive her from something she really loves, besides, at present time she is growing and healthy and she does fine with it in her diet."

Cohen credits her daughter with a good diet; she eats meat, plus her mother's mix of vegetable-based foods. That's what's more important to Cohen — ensuring Gabby has fresh, healthy foods.

"I made her own baby food and attribute her great eating habits to eating real healthy homemade foods with no sugar and preservatives, which you would find in the jarred foods," Cohen explains. "When she gets older she can make her own choices whether or not she wants that type of food diet."

From a purely nutritional standpoint, raising a vegetarian child may require more planning but that's largely dependent on where you live. The Hobbses live in Boulder, Colo., where there is easy access to a wide variety of fresh foods and vegetarian options. Cohen lives in rural upstate New York, where the options are slim, especially in winter after the farmers markets have shut down.

Schools are also starting to get on board to help parents. A report from the School Nutrition Association reveals a forty percent rise since 2003 in the number of schools offering vegetarian fare. The numbers equate to at least two in three schools serving up meat-free options.

Even better news for parents of vegetarian kids: the American Dietetic Association is now officially behind you. According to paper released by the ADA just this past summer, "Vegetarian diets, if well-planned, are healthful and nutritious for all age groups and can help prevent and treat chronic diseases."

Engebretson says that raising a child as a vegan or vegetarian has shed its stigma in the day of widespread food allergies. "Sometimes kids try to share their non-vegan items like goldfish crackers. I don't snatch them away from her; I just tell the sharing child, 'thank you, but she can't eat those.' If she eats a few, no big deal," she says. "This is the same situation that kids who are allergic to nuts, wheat or chocolate face as well, so I don't see it as placing an extraordinary burden on her."

— Lost My Perspective in the Baking Ingredients Aisle

Dear Lost,

The hardcore bake sale scene does put the pressure on. But we are here to give some perspective: You are not required to bring home the bacon, bake it into muffins and provide a notarized letter re: the provenance of every ingredient. No matter how much the class rep to the parenting association nudges.

That's the good news. The bad news is, this is only the beginning. You *and your husband* will be asked to give time, skills, money, rummage, canned food, gently used books and/or small bits of flesh year after year for as long as your child is part of the educational system. (Unless you move somewhere where schools actually get enough money from the government to perform up to the standards of the parents who send their children there.) The expectation varies depending on where your kid is in school, but it's pretty much a given that parents are expected to help out somewhat. Some take this super-seriously. Many others blow it off, for lack of time or lack of interest.

One suggestion we'd make is to try to loosen the symbolic reins a little. Sometimes a bake sale is just a bake sale. Yes, it emerged from a time of more prescribed gender roles, but really, people just like cake. For every parent who dreads the pie tin, there's another who dreads the fancy dress auction, or the softball game at the class picnic. If you can't deal with baking, don't bake. Buy something and hand it over with your head held high (and the ingredients conveniently preprinted on the package!) Or beg off. We can assure you that you will not be the only one who shows up empty-handed that morning. And we can also assure you that there will be many opportunities for you to be of service to your child's school. We can't guarantee you'll hate those any less, but they probably won't require you to wear an apron.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com

Click to buy Ceridwen and Rebecca's book!

Watching episode after episode, my wife and I have laughed ourselves to tears imagining our lives played out as Don and Betty Draper, only in our version, the show would be called "SAHD Men" with me feeding the kids dinner every night and handing my wife a stiff drink as soon as she walks through the door after another hard day at the office. I suspect we're not alone indulging in such fantasies, which, on a broader scale, is what I think fuels audiences' fascination with the show. There's a satisfying amusement that comes from comparing past societal and cultural nuances against those of the present. With the decidedly un-PC idiosyncrasies of the Eisenhower/Kennedy-era sexism portrayed in Mad Men, it's impossible to restrain our imaginations from inserting ourselves somewhere within the drama and then dissecting those moments through the contexts of the current day.

For me, as a full-time parent to five children, there is a part of me that relates to Betty. I would love, for example, to conveniently dump off the kids on a nanny who, it seems, can be conjured out of thin air, and the isolation in being a househusband could drive me to take up chain-smoking as a hobby. (Although, due to anatomical differences, I avoid using the washing machine for, ahem . . . hard-core fans catch my drift.) However, despite my non-traditional domestic role, I am, after all, a man and a father, so Don still represents the character I identify the closest with, which also explans why I am the best-dressed, most unflappably cool parent at the bus stop.

As the show's central figure, Don is probably the maddest of the mad men (and women), and his behavior can elicit loathing, sympathy, admiration and every combination thereof. But next to Betty, who locks children in closets, lets them use a Cellophane bag as an astronaut helmet and generally treats them as nitwits, Don wins "Parent of the Year" by default.

But for all of Mad Men's vaunted authenticity, critics point out the omission of Dr. Benjamin Spock's permissive parenting philosophy which was widely prevalent among the upper-middle class during this period. This inconsistency may be due to creator Matthew Weiner's original plan to show little of Don's home life, or it might be because Betty and Don are just that selfish when it comes to meeting their children's individual needs. Although, unlike Betty, Don's problem isn't that he doesn't engage his children, it's that he's never home on a regular basis. Opinions vary on Don's parenting, and indeed, the children's reactions to the news of the divorce were telling: Bobby automatically assumes he's the cause while Sally first blames Don for never keeping his promises and then accuses Betty of instigating the separation. Still, given his own upbringing, I contend that Don is a good father, or at least a well-intentioned one anyway. (Other dads like those at DadCentric agree.)

Considering that he is the illegitimate son of a whore who died during birth and an uncompassionate father who never accepted him as a son, Don could have turned out worse as a parent. Instead, Don wants to avoid the sins of his father, who beat Don regularly. Take for instance the episode, "Three Sundays," when Don and Betty argue over his reluctance to punish Bobby. Frustrated by his wife's haranguing, Don slings Bobby's toy across the room and sends him to bed. "Are you happy?" he yells at Betty. Later he apologizes to Bobby, demonstrating a rare vulnerability in Don. When Bobby asks if Don's dad yelled at him, Don nods and then hugs Bobby at his suggestion that Don needs a new daddy.

This is not an isolated example of Don's love for his children. He attends Sally's school functions and takes her to work with him. He's understanding of her fear of the dark and promises a nightlight (provided she keeps her room clean). He gets up in the middle of the night to rock baby Eugene. "I've done it before," he reminds Betty when she walks in offering to take over. Plus, he wants the kids in the divorce. And, yes, it could be out of retribution, but I contend it's because he doesn't want them growing up being ignored by Betty. Okay, yeah, he was playing "Sputnik" with his daughter's teacher, and that warrants consequences. Regardless, Don puts forth the effort to be a real dad in a period when being a good father was judged on lesser criteria.

As I listen to my parents talk about growing up in the 50s and 60s, their stories are laced with a sense that the standards for fatherhood (and those of a husband) boiled down to the ability to hold down a steady job and put a roof over the family's head. So, screaming at my mother and smashing plates because the dishes weren't cleaned, as her father did on a regular basis, or in my dad's case, dodging the bullets fired at him by his drunken father were perfectly acceptable behaviors because my grandfathers were admirable for putting food on the table and clothes on my parent's backs. While I'm sure everyone's childhood experiences in that era were not that extreme, the mentality of fatherhood being measured predominantly on a man's role as a provider was commonly held to.

With parents, and especially fathers, being as involved in their children's lives as they are today, this mindset seems absurd. Yet it once was the norm, which is why Don deserves at least a little credit. Lucky for me, my parents, like Don, determined not to raise their children as they had been. Even though they were left without a healthy functioning example on which to pattern their child-rearing, they muddled through it doing the best they could with what they did know. Walking in their shoes, I now can appreciate what it must have taken.

With no model of his own, Don is in a similar situation, and despite his best intentions as a father, there are instances when he appears lost. A poignant example of this occurs in the season finale when he finds Sally waiting for him, asleep in the spare bedroom Don has been banished to. Don sits down in the chair, a confused expression on his face as he contemplates what is best for his children as the family is about to be broken up. With nothing to say, Don does the only thing he can think of: Rather than carry Sally to her room, he crawls into bed next to her.

Having been in that exact same position at one point in my life, I recognized the look on Don's face. I could feel the confusion in his gut, and the loss of a clear-cut path to take. As I relived those feelings reenacted by Don's character in a fictional story set almost five decades ago, it sparked an ironic thought. In this modern age when mothers and fathers consider themselves more enlightened than those of previous generations; where an unlimited amount of advice is a mere mouse click away and teams of experts wax eloquent about the newest insights into child development, sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes there are moments when we parents realize that, whether it's the 1960s or the 2060s, one truth spans the history of raising children: we don't have all the answers, and sometimes we're just doing the best we can.

Mad Men's Season 3 has come to an end and fanatics everywhere are going to have to wait what feels like a lifetime to get their next Draper fix. We've swooned over Don, envied Betty's clothes and...the kids? Well, let's just hope there's some therapy in Sally, Bobby and baby Gene's future. We've especially enjoyed tsk-tsking the mid-century parenting styles of Don and Betty, but we wonder — are there still some throwbacks out there? Do you wish your child would just "go watch TV?" So before we bid a temporary farewell to our favorite dysfunctional family, we want to know if you parent like a Draper. If so, which one? —Cary Fagan

Before parenthood, we globe trotted without a care. Our passports grew thick with hundreds of stamps from work and leisure travel and a two-year stint in Moscow, where I became pregnant. With the news of the pregnancy, the warnings from our seasoned-parent friends became louder.

"You'll see," our friends said. "Once you have a kid, life will change, and you won't travel anymore."

The excuses ranged from financial constraints and travel-related illnesses, to disrupting sleep schedules and the inconveniences of air travel. Gripped by their kid-fears, most parents we knew let their children dictate their lives. Rather than grounding us, our daughter's birth fueled our sense of adventure. Of course having a baby meant tweaking our lifestyle a bit, but most of the changes we made accommodated our desire to see the world, not her schedule.

In January, and with Eloise walking and talking, we accepted another overseas assignment, and our family moved to Douala, Cameroon. Visions of the three of us crisscrossing the continent in a safari jeep made me giddy with excitement. For a few months, our move to West Africa fit neatly into our plan of raising a little citizen of the world. 

Our two-year-old recited her ABCs and counted to ten in both English and French. She knew the difference between a water buffalo and a cow. And she understood that the world is larger than "Birginia," where she was born, or "Norf Carwina," and "New Orweans," where her grandparents live.

Our big world shrank pretty small this spring, however, when we hit some turbulence. The only bug we had hoped she would catch was the travel bug. So when our Cameroonian doctor stood in our bedroom and told us that Eloise had malaria, tears welled in my eyes and self-loathing thoughts ran rampant through my mind.

That first night, her fever reached 104 degrees, and in those moments that she lay writhing and moaning in my arms, I questioned every decision we had made up until that point. Maybe our friends and family were right. Maybe we shouldn't take all these risks with our daughter and just live a "normal" life, in which Disney World tops our travel wish list.

Upon hearing the news, all of our seasoned-parent friends and family responded with the same shock: "Malaria!" The naysayers were vindicated.

But after three days of mixing a green liquid medicine into her chocolate milk and bribing her with cookies to drink it, our little worm wriggled her way back onto her trampoline — malaria free. Along with her declining fever, those moments of doubts about our unconventional lifestyle faded. We understood well what could have happened, but our family had no room for kid-fears in our suitcases. Armed with our antimalarial pills, mosquito nets and bug repellent, we started planning for our next big trip to see the mountain gorillas in Rwanda.

Hiking three hours through the rainforest to see Dian Fossey's gorillas poses many problems for a toddler. (We have limits.) So we did something our friends back home would have done. We hired a baby sitter. We found her through the American Embassy in Kigali, and the next day, Brian and I trekked up to the gorillas and back again, reuniting with Eloise at the lodge by 3 p.m.

Eloise missed the big furry beasts, but they probably would have freaked her out anyway. Instead, she rode with us through the countryside, with children waving and running along side the car. She saw kids, not much older than she, playing and working on farms. She heard different languages and learned how to say a new word, "Rahwunda."

This time, I posted pictures of our travels on Facebook. Some of the images showed Eloise posing with a plaster gorilla family back at the lodge, and others showed Brian and I less than six feet from an actual silverback. As I expected, the comments rushed in. But this time, they took a different tone.

"Amazing," and "sooo cool," appeared in multiple posts from those who typically knocked our decision to show Eloise the world. Finally, it seemed, we agreed on something. The trip was "awesome," as one friend wrote, but having our little worm along for the ride made it more so — spiritual even.

I expect when Eloise grows up, she might not remember vividly the mountains of Rwanda. She may have forgotten how to speak French, and for sure, she will only know the Moroccan kisses as a classic family story told to her throughout the years. But if she has a choice between traveling to Disney or Dakar, I hope she senses that same mysterious calling we felt that first year in Fez and lets passion, not fear, guide her through her life.

All photographs by Jamie and Brian Rich

We smiled. We made excuses. But it persisted.

Now, at three and a half, Roxie is certainly stimulated by novel experiences, people and situations. But put her in a peer group setting like, say, preschool circle time, and she goes all Chauncey Gardiner — more content to watch than join in.

Or, so it would seem.

As many of her fellow preschoolers merrily belt out "Little Bunny Foo Foo" animated with hand movements, Roxie, who knows all the words and gestures (and performs them with relish at home in front of the mirror), remains silent, hands in her lap. In a free art class offered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, other kids streak by her through the halls of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the ancient New World on the hunt for the fon elephant from the Republic of Benin. Instead, Roxie lags behind with me and the other parents and caregivers required to be there. It's not that she doesn't know where the elephant is (she does) or even that she doesn't enjoy the hunt (she says "it's fun"). But rather than let go and join the others, or even let on she's enjoying it, she walks quietly until she reaches the spot where the bright silver statue stands encased in glass, then remains outside the throng of kids and merely points. There, she says in a whisper.

Is she shy? Slow to warm up? Highly sensitive with a dread of social evaluation? What leads her to hold back in these situations? Is it genetic, environmental? A temporary stage of development? A life-long condition?

In our Got Talent culture we have come to expect even our youngest children to be high achievers — feisty swimmers, masterful drawers, gregarious preschool socialites. A shy or reticent temperament can dampen our hopes and evokes our own peculiar brand of parental angst. But is it that our child may miss out on some extroverts-only experiences that worries us or is something more primal, more prideful at work? The fear, perhaps, that our child will never shine?

According to a recent major study, 42 percent of American children exhibit shyness and the percentage only increases with age. "Thirty or forty years ago, being shy didn't used to be as negatively stereotyped as it is today," said Lynne Henderson, a former faculty member at Stanford University and director of the Shyness Institute.

In recent years, psychologists have battled as to whether or not shyness is genetic, a reaction to environment, or some combination. Jerome Kagan, a prominent Harvard research psychologist, was the first to identify traits in infancy that predict shyness. He believes temperament is destiny, or at least, shyness is a priori, a point he set out to prove when he began a major longitudinal study in 1986, researching 500 sixteen-week olds. Tracking data including how the babies reacted when given a new toy, he and colleagues determined that the most highly reactive sixteen-week olds, those with the most visible signs of distress and alarm when handed a new toy, proved to be the shyest children when they were interviewed as eleven-year-olds.

But, even if a child is hardwired to be highly sensitive or shy, many experts argue, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a behavioral marker for life on the sidelines.

"Many children will outgrow their strong reticence and reactions," said Dr. Henderson of the Shyness Institute. "About 93 percent of shy children never become problematically shy."

But, early detection of social awkwardness and intervention can make a significant difference later on she said.

"I've had a lot of parents who say they wished they'd done something sooner," said Nicole Shiloff, a clinical psychologist who specializes in adolescent shyness and social anxiety at the Shyness Clinic in Los Altos, Calif. "Giving a child a way to cope with their shyness or anxiety even really early on just better equips them for later."

A slew of books and online sites address shyness in children, and help parents understand where their child may fall in the spectrum of shy behavior. From a child with social anxiety who may experience profound psychological and physical reactions in a social situation to a child with one or two best friends who may not be in the social fray among peers, but doesn't mind it. Somewhere in the middle are the children who are slow-to-warm up, who may hesitate to join a social situation and take anywhere from two minutes, two weeks, two months or more to participate.

"I find that parents who have their own shyness or anxiety issues may over-identify with a shy child, and internalize that child's anxiety rather than help them develop mechanisms to cope with it," said Dr. Shiloff. There are also the parents who may be just the opposite. "They may be really extroverted and have some difficulty understanding a child who's tempermentally different," she said.

Which, in fact, is the case for Roxie and me.

The good news is there are many practical and easy suggestions of strategies parents, teachers and other caregivers can use not only to soothe a young bashful child, but also empower him or her. Included are tactics borrowed from cognitive behavior therapy that begin to teach even the youngest children how to identify and monitor thoughts, assumptions, beliefs and behaviors that relate to their shyness.?"With young children we tend to work on strategies for the parents," said Dr. Shiloff. "We teach parents for example, the cognitive behavior model of thinking aloud with a shy child to help alleviate some of the stress associated with an event."

For example, she suggested I could talk to Roxie before an activity to prepare her for some of the things that she may be asked to do, like sing along with the group, raise her hand or say her name aloud. Role-playing too can help to build a child's confidence. "Especially with young children who look to their parents for social cues, it's important to model the kind of pro-social behavior you're expecting from your child," said Dr. Shiloff. "And, we recommend getting the teacher involved, maybe even setting up a reward system to reinforce positive social behavior."

Although there is debate among experts over what constitutes social anxiety versus shyness, one thing all the experts agree on is not to label a child as "shy," which only serves to make a child more self-conscious and heighten his or her sense of discomfort.

Recently, Robert Coplan, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa and colleagues, have been at work designing a program they hope can be implemented in schools and other community activities that will challenge and encourage chronically shy preschoolers to become more active participants.

Our goal here is not to change your child, Dr. Coplan wrote of his program in a recent email. "Our goal is to help children develop the necessary coping strategies so that their shyness does not prevent them from doing things in their life that they want to do," he said.

Of course, experts also caution that we must be careful not to pathologize this temperament. After all, Dr. Henderson from the Shyness Institute explained, shyness is a blend of fear and interest.

"To have a shy reaction is a wired response that helps us pause to identify friends and collaborators from predators before we enter the fray," she said. "So shyness can also be a positive attribute," she added.

Dropping Roxie off at preschool one recent morning after a chat about some of the kids she was looking forward to seeing, I witnessed this primitive response in action. The children's day was getting started with a dance party and when we arrived, a little girl (whom Roxie had mentioned) broke from the group of kids and teachers and bounded up to us. "She's my best friend," the girl informed me as she enveloped Roxie in a bear hug. She grabbed Roxie's hand and began to drag her toward the preschool mosh pit. I saw Roxie's moment of hesitation and I found myself holding my breath, beaming a large smile of encouragement. But, without so much as a backward glance, Roxie stepped to the edge of the circle and then into the group with her friend, and cautiously, a little awkwardly, began to dance.

My son had to stay in the hospital, Bellevue, a few extra days, suffering from a difficult delivery and high bilirubin scores. My wife was laid up for three more days. All the family was around us, and one of the uncles, in a moment of enlightened selflessness, brought us a full meal on the second day. Something the both of us, my wife especially, desperately needed. A few days later, after time under the tanning lights, our son's jaundice had receded and we took him home. The experience was heart-warming: it felt as if all hands were on deck, and help would be close by.

After a hastily organized bris on the traditional eighth day the family went their own ways. My wife's father went back to Los Angeles. The uncles went back to their homes in the same borough as us, close enough that a phone call could have them at our apartment in minutes. But little did I know that once the baby was home, the concept of help would become more hypothesis than reality, a contentious notion that created a serious family schism.

Being first-time parents, we weren't quite sure what to expect from our relatives. But it was just an assumption that aunts and uncles would pitch in, and that in fact, they would want to pitch in: perhaps bring a meal over every once in a while, or offer to do a little house cleaning, or even babysit a few hours here and there. About this, we were dead wrong.

My mother-in-law stayed for the first three months. Her help was enormous, not only lending a hand and waking up through the night, but also sharing her experiences raising three children with us. But she couldn't stay forever and left for the West Coast after the third month.

My wife and I took the reins and things went as well as they could have as we developed our own patterns of parenting. After about six months, we realized that there was a scarcity of calls from the uncles and aunts: even the grandfather back in Los Angeles seemed over it all. Neither a "How is everythin?" call was received, nor were even the simplest of text messages sent. We began to feel hurt from what we perceived as a void of caring from my wife's immediate relatives. We would hear about these two couples having brunches together and wonder, why couldn't we be invited? We're totally morning people now! We would be invited for dinner, but because of the challenging schedules of a young baby, attending these was next-to-impossible. Turning down these invitations was perceived from their perspective as a slight, but they couldn't possibly understand the physical and psychological exhaustion we were going through.

This was the beginning of our estrangement from the uncles and aunts — four people who lived ridiculously close to us.

We cycled through a myriad of feelings. We were afraid to call to ask for help for fear of rejectio or that we would come across as too demanding. We also thought — though this was unspoken — that perhaps asking for too much help would be seen as a sign of weakness. As if we were saying, no, we can't raise this child on our own: we need help.

So we created a mantra: we don't need the help, but we would like it. And then the vortex of miscommunication hit, and over the next few months, accusations from both sides of the aisle flew back and forth, which boiled down to two prescient points: from our side, "You never offer to help," and from theirs, "If you don't ask for help, you don't deserve it."

The lack of reaching out forced my wife to reconsider her formerly close relationship (even friendship) with her brothers. Could this be the end of her tight bond with them? Had they grown disinterested now that she had a baby? Were their once-common interests diverging? As the tensions rose, the rift culminated into an all-out war of words about us being paranoid and lacking in perspective versus them having seemingly forgotten all about us. As if, poof, we had simply disappeared, fallen off the planet. At least that's how it felt.

Then finally during a sit-down between my wife and one of the uncles, our worst fears and paranoid feelings came true. The words "It's true, we never think about you anymore. Now we just think about the baby," came out of the uncle's mouth. There it was, the painful truth. We were no longer of any importance. As much as it hurt, we had known it all along. We weren't crazy, after all.

We had to ask ourselves, what did we expect from these people? Assumptions that had been made — that living close to uncles and aunts would offer us a respite, that they would help out on weekends, give us a few hours to ourselves to just go to brunch, or see a film, or just to sleep — were not being met.

We realized these people had their own lives, working long hours during the week. Their weekend hours are also precious. I discovered that parents can really become the worst kind of navel-gazers, looking inward with nary a glance outside the windows of our apartment. Sure, the phone calls and babysitting offers had not arrived, but maybe we were just looking at things from the prism of our new life. There are other worlds out there. We just couldn't see them.

After more than a year, family members with cooler heads — namely, my wife's mother — intervened. My wife and I admitted that, yes, we hadn't put in too many calls for help. Our relatives admitted that they could have put more of an effort into first contact.

I'm happy to report that we now receive unsolicited, regular babysitting calls. The relationships are on an even keel; one of the uncles even bought us a spa treatment and offered to take care of our boy while we went off to be steamed, massaged, and therapized.

If I had to do it all over again, I would know to ask for favors from the outset: We don't have much time to cook: do you think you could bring something over? What are you doing Saturday afternoon? How about we buy you lunch and you babysit for the afternoon? Asking for help is not a sin — and now that both couples are (yes) expecting, we'll all need a little more of it.

Kids don't get to be kids for long enough, Ms. Orenstein wrote. Play is an essential part of any child's childhood, an indispensable tool to forming relationships and becoming socially and emotionally stable and there isn't enough of it in today's kindergartens. Drilling kids with flash cards pushes them to grow up before they are ready, robbing them of opportunities to learn necessary skills that will help them compete in our global society. Oops. I was robbing my child of his childhood. He probably wasn't "playing" nearly enough. As I read I imagined the track my bright little boy was on. He'd be the socially awkward, uncoordinated kid who never got invited to parties, acted out in strange ways and drew pitying looks from his classmates. He'd probably smell bad, too.

What had I been thinking? Let the kid grow up when he was ready. Sigh. I hadn't planned for things to be this way. I thought he'd be the rough-and-tumble little boy who roared at everything and bit the furniture as he stalked the house defending his territory. But when he showed interest in the letter "S" at twenty months on a cross-country flight, I snagged the opportunity to keep him quiet and contained. We looked for S's in the in-flight magazines calmly and intently for the rest of the flight. After that, his appetite for letters, numbers and words could not be satiated.

I had assumed I was doing a good thing, feeding his interests, giving him hugs and kisses when he learned new things and generally making learning fun and exciting. I even skimmed through a book, How to Teach Your Baby to Read by Glenn Doman and Janet Doman. The Domans assured me that starting young would make it easier for the child to pick up on new words and learn to read. The older he was, even kindergarten age, the more difficult it would be. As I watched my child, still shy of his second birthday, learn to recognize nine words in one afternoon — with less than ten minutes of effort on my part — I became a believer. The few minutes I spent each day showing him new words and then testing him on them later in the week were going to save us from a world of frustration once he was actually "old enough" to learn to read.

But when I was reminded of the power of play I decided to step back and watch for a while. Did my child even know how to play? I got out the wooden train set he had received for Christmas and spread the tracks on the floor. He spent a few minutes puttering around with them before coming to me and insisting I do it for him. Same story with the playdough. Hmm. At play groups I noticed him standing on the sidelines, unsure of what to do while other kids his age tackled each other, wrestled over balls and pulled things out of the toy fridge. Then he found a book and brought it to me to read to him. Hmm again. And finally, while playing at the park with some friends, he watched, puzzled, as two boys his age battled with sticks the size of staves. His own wand-sized stick, held loosely in his hand, remained unused. Certainly this was the lack of play that would prevent my child from forming lasting relationships, from figuring out how to build bridges, from becoming a contributing member of society. I hung my head in shame.

Still, I don't intend to stop my encouragement of his intellectual pursuits. Not only does it make him happy, it makes me really, really happy. Why? Because playing with him is, um, boring. And frustrating. He doesn't understand the rules of the games. He pushes me around indecisively whenever I let him take charge. He gets distracted. He makes messes that I have to clean up. Standing at the bottom of the slide waiting for him to come down and hovering beside him while he climbs up the tricky ladders at the playground lest he lose his teeth may be fun for him, but a mother can only take so much. We both need our alone time and, of course, we get it. But when we're together, I'd rather spend it doing something that has measurable results, something that I can look back on and say, "I taught him that." Watching him learn letters and words allows me to look back on the day and count it as a success.

And so, at my house, we blur the line between learning and play. We can spend a half-hour sitting on the couch bending chenille stems into Os or spelling out words on flash cards and be utterly delighted. To heck with building towers with oversize legos. Making Ts with them is so much more fun. Who cares about drawing, unless a W magically appears in the random scribbles? Now that is cool stuff. And so what if it's too cold to play outside? We've only read Corduroy four times. There's still plenty of fun to be had.

— Are You There God, It's Me Mommy

Dear Are You There God,

One of us was recently involved in a conversation with parents about this very issue. How do you talk to a kid about god (we'll go lowercase here, out of respect for your beliefs) when you don't know whether you believe in god yourself? Or when you know that you don't, but don't want to force your ideology down your kid's throat? A lot of thoughtful discussion was had, and there were no easy answers. Is it as easy as saying "This is what I believe, this is what other people believe, you can believe what you want . . .?"

It's a bit much to expect a three-year-old to understand this abstract choice. She doesn't even know what or who god is, let alone whether to hitch her horse to his (or her or its) cart. One mom suggested parents should play shrink, dodging any personal inquiries by lobbing questions right back. We like this idea, if only for exploratory purposes: You want to know why this is coming up now. What has she heard? What does she think? But if she's anything like our kids, she'll eventually demand a direct answer on your own beliefs. Avoiding her curiosity won't be much help. As parents, your beliefs matter. At this age, it's fairly likely that she'll follow your lead.

When we read your letter, we were struck (and impressed) by your openminded attitude. Not every atheist (or anything-ist) shares your views, namely, that it's ok for not everyone to share the same views.  And therein lies the answer to your question. It seems like what you're looking to teach your daughter is not what to believe, but how to respect different beliefs.

When ("if" is not a realistic expectation) your daughter asks you about god, we suggest you tell her a simple version of your truth. And follow up with some context, including the fact that other people she loves have other ideas . . . and how that's ok with you. In terms of how exactly to talk about it, there are lots of ways. Sometimes people frame religion like a story that some people believe is true and others don't. You can also tell her feelings about god are a little bit like feelings in general; unique to each individual. So there's room for everybody's own ideas about god; yours, Grandma's, and eventually, her own.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com

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It's the kind of scenario that can make parents of a toddler and an infant toss down their burp cloths in despair and think, as they narrowly avoid tripping over the musical truck, that having two young kids means no one's ever satisfied.

But while you can't keep 'em both happy all of the time, here are a few tricks to keep them, and you, from pitching a fit most of the time. — Shoshana Kordova

It takes three to tango (and eat, and change a diaper)

When the latest arrival needs to be held or fed, your primary interest may be baby's basic needs, but just about any infant-centered activity can become fun for the kid who might be feeling displaced. The baby's gassy? Hold her while dancing and singing silly songs with your older kid (our favorite made-up ditty includes the line "Don't drink beer in my ear, it makes it hard to hear"). The baby's gotta eat? Whether you're nursing or bottle-feeding, extend your limited lap space by grabbing a spot where you can put up your legs, and ask your toddler if she wants to sit on you (even better if you have toys or books nearby). As for the diaper change, lots of toddlers like being, er, helpful, and handing you a diaper is one of the least calamitous forms of help a toddler can offer.

Find the pattern

It's always a good idea to pay attention to what sets off your kid, and that's all the more true when monitoring the way the former center of attention reacts to the cause of her reduction in star status. Maybe there's something about the time of day or the way you relate to your infant that sparks a meltdown in your toddler; pay attention to the contributing factors and you may be able to head off an ear-numbing exercise of the will. I noticed that my oldest would get upset if I tried to feed the baby at a time when big sis was usually hungry. Now I grab some food, get my toddler into the high chair and sit next to her while feeding both of them. Which brings us to the next point . . .

Don't paint yourself into a nursing corner

Some moms like settling in with baby in the same comfy feeding spot every time. But while that can be great at the right moment, be open to feeding the baby wherever your toddler is. The same holds for other necessaries, especially if you've got multiple rooms, or floors, you hang out in. If you have diaper-changing basics or safe baby-dumping spots (even just a blanket or towel spread out on the floor) in a few strategic locations, it'll be easier to stay with both kids. And if you do have to, or want to, go somewhere else with the little one, try asking your toddler if she wants to sit on the couch with mommy too.

View your home as a kid lab

Don't keep doing something just because it's what you started off doing; your kids are changing every day, so if something isn't working right now (even if it used to), modify it. The trickiest time in our house is my toddler's bath-and-bed time, because I need to give her my attention when the baby is likely to be hungry or kvetchy. I tried sticking to our old routine, but got too stressed if I could hear crying in the other room. I tried simultaneous bath-giving and baby-wearing, but found it too cumbersome. I tried giving big sis an earlier bath if the baby was calm, and that worked well until I started hitting resistance. I ultimately settled on putting the baby in her car seat and bringing her into the bathroom with us, but I'm up for figuring out something else if this doesn't pan out either. There's no way of knowing what will work best for you at any given time other than by trial and error, so try, try, try again.

I'll take two

Keep spares of baby stuff in stock, ready to offer to your toddler if she expresses interest. Mine hadn't used a bottle in nearly a year, but as soon as she saw the baby getting one, it became the hottest item of the season. Instead of saying, "No, that's for the baby," we gave her a bottle of her own that looks different from the others. She also adores having her own blanket spread out on the floor, right next to the baby mat; when I first put it down she stalked around the perimeter with this huge proprietary grin, proud to have her own territory to stake out.

Make some one-on-one

No matter how well you manage to incorporate both kids into your daily tasks, at some point you'll probably feel like you're shortchanging at least one of them. So before you rush off on the never-ending quest to cross off everything on your to-do list when one of them falls asleep, take a few minutes to let your toddler swing like a monkey from your neck or to have a staring contest with your baby while speaking in a ridiculously high-pitched voice. It's worth building up a bank of one-on-one time, both for your kids' sense of security and so that the next time one or both of them is too tired, hungry or sick for any of these tricks to work, at least you'll know in your heart that — despite the surround-sound crying you're sure will have the neighbors calling social services — you've been doing your darndest.

Patrimony: A True Story by Philip Roth

I can't think of a more honest or unflinching account of fatherhood. This is the story of Roth taking care of his father, who is dying of brain cancer. There is a scene in the beginning — Roth's sick, aged father wipes his feces all over the bathroom. It's very easy to talk about feeling awe or great affection or worry about the family but I think it's very hard, and also more honest, to talk about the shit and blood and physicality of it. That was one of the things that surprised me about parenting, actually. Babies are not intellectual human beings — in the beginning, they are not even capable of smiling, the most simple expression of human life — and yet they're demanding of a physical relationship. One of the funny — or not so funny — tricks of life: As you get older, relationships come back to that physicality. You might find yourself wearing a diaper again and needing someone to bathe and feed you. Can anyone hold a baby without imagining oneself as an old person or the baby as an old person?

Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier

This book is like the continuation of Patrimony in a sense, because it begins after the end. Weiseltier immerses himself in the Jewish ritual of saying Kaddish after his father dies ? this act of committing himself does not mean he can make sense of death but he engages with it. Religious or not, as a parent, you are somebody who makes rituals. Whether it is a particular succession of books at bedtime or waffles on Thursday mornings ? they're all practices that you repeat and they take on a special meaning. Ritual gives kids and adults a sense of structure where structure is naturally lacking. It's the counting on it that matters.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

I was so moved by this novel, particularly by the way the father and daughter are bound together through shame. The father's shame comes from the fact that he won't admit to an affair he had and the shame of his daughter is for her country, about apartheid in South Africa. Shame can be a good thing though ? it can prompt exploration. It was actually the inspiration for me to write my new book, Eating Animals . There is the shame of a kid asking you a question and not being able to answer it, of almost entirely forgetting your responsibility. Why do we eat animals? Children's questions highlight our inconsistencies and paradoxes, but they also inspire us to consider the answers.

Life? Or Theatre? By Charlotte Salomon

I was in Amsterdam and I just stumbled into the Jewish museum. Salomon's work — the paintings and text that make up this book — was on display there. There was something about the line of suicides in her family — her grandmother, aunt and mother all took their own lives — and the idea of inescapable fate that drew me in. Since I've become a father I've become very aware of things that are handed down on purpose and by accident. And I'm interested in what can be resisted. I have a bad habit, for example, of being anti-confrontational. I know why I have it — we can usually trace these things to historical and familial trauma. Part of being a parent is the opportunity to correct these things. I admire Salomon for resisting her fate so forcefully through her art. Sorrowfully, the Nazis captured her not long after she made these paintings and she was killed at Auschwitz. The conflict is: How can art redeem or correct? Sometimes it can't. And yet we keep doing it.

1.? You are working on a project when you hear your child crying in another room where you know they are being supervised by a responsible adult.? You:

  A. Drop what you are doing to check in and make sure the situation is addressed before it gets worse.
  B. Wait to see if the cries turn into wails before taking a peek.
  C. Let the adult who is supervising handle it.? You will only get involved if there is blood.

2. The office holiday party is scheduled for the same day as your child?s school show.? You:

  A. Go to the party and makes sure someone who loves your child is in the audience, armed with a video camera so that you can watch it later with your child.
  B. Happily go to your child?s show because you hate those office parties anyway.? Now you have a good excuse.
  C. Try to make it to both events, missing substantial portions of each but successfully showing your face for a period of time.

3.? It is 4:30 p.m. and you have an important deadline in the morning.? You have at least four more hours of work to complete the project.? You:

  A. Stop working at 5:00 p.m., spend time with the family and then, once the kids are in bed, work until 1:00 a.m.
  B. Call and ask for an extension until tomorrow afternoon.
  C. Work past 5:00 and through dinner because you can?t relax with the project hanging over your head.

4.? Which of the following work projects is most appealing to you?

  A. A longer term project for which you are solely responsible.
  B. A group effort that requires consensus and the bringing together of work and ideas.
  C. A combination of both individual and team efforts.

5.? How do you like to communicate best with others?

  A. In person
  B. Telephone
  C. Email

6. A large but important project is coming down the pike and has yet to be assigned.? You:

  A. Raise your hand to lead it; you always like a challenge.
  B. Offer to help if needed.
  C. Make yourself invisible.

7. You get an email from a colleague that is written in all capital letters.? You:

  A.Wonder why he is "yelling" at you and spend the rest of the day thinking about what you could have possibly done wrong.
  B. Reply back to him in caps asking, "WHY ARE YOU YELLING AT ME?"
  C. Pick up the phone and call him to straighten it out person to person.

8.? It has been a few days since you have heard from your boss.? You view this as:

  A. A welcome rest; you take it when you can get it.
  B. A sign you are about to get canned; you begin to update your resume.
  C. An uncomfortable pause; you call your boss to check in and see what?s happening.

9. During work hours, the phone rings and you see it is your closest friend from college.? You:

  A. Anxiously pick up the phone and talk for the next thirty minutes.
  B. Pick it up and ask if you can call him or her back when you are done work.
  C. Let the call go to voicemail and make a note to call back later in the evening.

10.? Which is more important to you during the day?

  A. A change of scenery.
  B. A change of pace.
  C. I don?t like change.

11.? Which area do you question yourself the most?

  A. My abilities as a professional.
  B. My abilities as a parent.
  C. Both parent and professional equally.
 

For each of the following statements, select how often each applies to you:? (always, sometimes, never)

12.? I have a hard time focusing on projects until the deadline is upon me.

  A. Always
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

13. I work best under pressure.

  A. Always
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

14.? Praise for a job well done is important to me.

  A. Always ?
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

15. I like to multi-task.

  A. Always ?
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

16. I have a hard time ignoring housework that is piling up.

  A. Always ?
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

17.? When working on a project, I value the input of others.

  A. Always
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

18.? I enjoy working in my profession.

  A. Always ?
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

19.? I enjoy socializing with colleagues from work.

  A. Always ?
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

20.? I feel guilty that I don?t spend enough time with my family.

  A. Always ?
  B. Sometimes
  C. Never

Scoring Guide

Question

A

B

C

Your Score

1

5

3

1

2

1

5

3

3

3

5

1

4

1

5

3

5

1

3

5

6

1

3

5

7

5

3

1

8

3

5

1

9

5

3

1

10

5

3

1

11

1

5

3

12

5

3

1

13

1

3

5

14

5

3

1

15

1

3

5

16

5

3

1

17

5

3

1

18

1

3

5

19

5

3

1

20

5

3

1

Results:

Score between 75-100? — Working from home is a possibility for everyone but you may need to make some significant adjustments to make it work.?The most difficult aspects of working from home for you will likely be to stay focused on the task at hand, especially when no one is watching you.?Carving out private physical space away from the noise of your family and establishing your own practices to stay in touch and on time with work will be tremendously helpful.?Set deadlines and keep them.?Arrange for the kids to be out of earshot while you are working, if at all possible.?And make it a habit to connect with someone from work everyday to discuss what you are doing.?These practices may not come naturally but if you stick to them, you can establish the right environment to thrive.

Score between 46-74 — You seem to have an equal balance of commitment to your family and your profession which bodes extremely well for working from home.?You realize that there is tremendous give and take between the two competing priorities.?Chances are you will be very successful in your home office but that doesn?t mean you won?t ever feel guilty about coming up short on either end of the spectrum.?Guilt is a given, no matter how smooth you are.?Communication with both parties (family and work) is critical to avoid major conflicts.?Don?t beat yourself up for playing hooky from work for an hour or two to run an errand, as long as you make it up somewhere along the way and don?t miss deadlines.?And when your child complains that you are in your office too much, tell yourself that the alternative of NOT being there is much worse.

Score between 20-45? — You have a great deal of professional drive which can be a very positive thing when working from home.?However, your biggest challenge will be that you can never "leave the office" and you might find yourself working too hard to at the expense of your family.?This work ethic is indeed important, particularly at the beginning of a work from home arrangement, so that your colleagues know you are serious about your job.?But once you prove yourself, you can relax a bit.?When the phone is ringing after hours, you don?t always have to pick it up.?And during work hours, try not to be chained to your desk. Give yourself a break, stand up, stretch your legs and go hang out with your kids for ten minutes in the middle of the day. Homework does have benefits which you are permitted to reap and still do a great job.

"Ok, fellas.?Mom has to take this one.?Scoot.?We?ll finish later."

On cue, they both roll their eyes and leave the spare bedroom that functions as my office, shutting the door behind them.?They have learned to always shut the door.?It will be another two hours before I can hear the rest of their day?s events. I feel a wave a guilt wash over me followed by another wave of responsibility as the phone rings for a third time.?I pick it up and get back to work, answering a series of questions from a reporter on deadline.?It?s a balance I have come to embrace over the last decade.?Since 2000, I have worked full time from home.

I manage the communications for a multi million dollar trade association in Washington D.C. from Philadelphia where I average a 50-60 hour work week. More and more I am coming into contact with professional parents like myself who make working from home work for them, their employers, and their families.?Gone are the days when you can?t have a serious career if it doesn?t all go down in an office building. Over the past decade, thanks largely to the Internet, you can hold a high powered job from your extra bedroom or basement while spending more time with the kids.?But it isn?t easy.?

Sure, it sounds heavenly but it?s not the cake walk many assume it is.?When I tell people about this arrangement, they often give me a look which I interpret as politely dismissive.?I imagine them thinking to themselves that "work" must not be the operative term in "work from home" and that my job must be mindless enough to perform while watching my children and soap operas all at the same time.?Judging by the unsolicited email offers I get for "home-based employment opportunities", these lighter jobs must exist, but mine is not one of them.?

Table Stakes

Sharing time between work and family is difficult enough; now imagine sharing time AND space. All the stars must be in alignment to effectively work out of your house but the two most important factors for a successful home office is 1) having the right job and 2) solid buy-in from your employer. Without those elements, you are doomed to fail.?The good news is that there are an increasing number of jobs that can be performed well almost exclusively via the web and telephone.?One good way to test if your job might be suitable is to ask yourself whether your work output can be produced and delivered to your customer (client, boss, or colleague) electronically.?Public relations, marketing, writing, consulting, computer programming, law and even accounting are conducive to work at home arrangements.?However, if your job requires you to manage large groups of people or meet face-to-face with colleagues, clients, or other stakeholders every day, you may be out of luck unless they can come to your house.?Conference calls work very well for occasional pow-wows, but using them in place of daily meetings can become disengaging.?

Speaking of disengaging, the second major criterion for a happy work from home arrangement is concurrence from all company stakeholders.?It goes without saying that your boss has to be on board with the deal but more importantly, so do your peers.?Jealously can be a huge factor, especially when one colleague has to brave rush hour and bad office coffee while the other gets an extra hour at home with the family and can wear sweatpants everyday.?Your arrangement must be justifiable to your team.?No one can complain that you are getting favored treatment if you live several hours away from the office.?If you live close to the office but are working from home, it?s a good idea for everyone with a similar job description to be offered the same arrangement.

Don?t Try This at Home

Once you have found the right job and the right employer to work from home, success is up to you.?Some of the best pieces for advice I have come from my experience of doing it completely wrong in the beginning.?After almost ten years of the daily grind within my own four walls I?ve learned what not to do.

Don?t go solo.? If you think you can get your work done and care for any of your children under the age of nine on a regular basis, you are fooling yourself. Assuming that you can bang out what you need to do when the kiddos are napping or watching Caillou seems like a good strategy until the first time they won?t go to sleep or the cable goes out.?Get real childcare.?Having a responsible babysitter who can take care of your children?s needs while you are working takes the stress out of your day.?This doesn?t mean they can?t pop into your office to say hello.?That benefit is probably the nicest perk of all.?But the earlier that your kids understand that Mom or Dad are working and need to be left alone, the more natural it becomes around the house for everyone.

Don?t be a sloth. ?Living the stereotypical dream of working in your pajamas is a bad idea.?Get up, take a shower, and put on day time clothes every morning. There is certainly no need to dress up, but changing into something suitable to be seen in public changes your energy level.?I wear jeans and hoodies most days at my office — but they are clean and fresh feeling each day and, therefore, so am I.

Don?t share space or devices.? Working at the kitchen table will be an exercise in complete frustration.?Try to find a place in your house that will be known to all as your office.?Ideally this space has a door you can close to shut out the joyous ruckus that occurs on a daily basis but if not, perhaps a screen or divider which creates a barrier between work and home.?This area should be as far away from the kitchen, playroom or other high traffic areas as possible.?You should also have a dedicated phone line and computer if your company will fit the bill or you can afford it.?Everything should be off limits to the kiddos and spouse.

Don?t watch TV.?? Unless watching TV is part of your job, don?t do it during the workday.?You wouldn?t watch television if you were in an office.?Even though no one will ever know, you need to imagine that your boss is there.?Besides, you will be distracted enough with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn all day long; don?t handicap yourself any further.

Don?t dive in. ??Every morning, I take my boys to school at 8:30 a.m. and return home to start my workday.?It seems inconsequential but leaving the house and returning to the office gets me psychologically ready to transition from Mom to Vice President.?I heard of one woman who worked from home who literally walked out her door each morning, around the house once, and back inside again for the same effect.?Brilliant! ?It may sound goofy but it works.

Don?t be a recluse.? After working from home for a long period of time, you do start to get a little stir crazy.?I know that I need to get out of the house when I start asking my dog for her opinion on strategic work decisions.?I am lucky that my job requires travel every few weeks when I can be among the living and have real human contact.?If you don?t have these opportunities, be sure to make lunch dates locally every now and then so that you don?t feel like a total shut-in.?Weather permitting, get outside and breathe fresh air once each day.?Walk the dog, get the mail, or go once around the block.?Otherwise, you may never stand up from your chair.

Don?t miss phone calls.? I am a fanatic for answering my phone when it rings, sometimes to my detriment.?Yet, I feel that working from home is a privilege that I will not abuse; and to prove that to all with whom I work, I pick up my phone a great deal after hours.?This commitment served me extremely well, especially in the early days of my arrangement when I proved to everyone that they could count on me even if I wasn?t in the office next to them.?

Don?t be in the closet.? Trying to maintain the illusion that you are in the company?s office when you?re not is untruthful and unnecessary.?When I am talking to a reporter on the phone, I don?t offer that I am working from home but I don?t hide it either.?Sometimes I will warn them that I may be briefly interrupted by my "lunatic nine-year-old" who is home that day with a fake illness.?Most react in a good natured way.?Not only does this relieve the pressure to keep things quiet but it makes you human and most other humans have an appreciation for the universal challenges faced by working parents provided it doesn?t get in the way of doing a good job.

Becoming a Permanent Homebody

Even if you follow these tips, working from home may not jive for you.?It is the ultimate balancing act and crossing the streams of work and play do not always turn out well. Sometimes the challenges outweigh the benefits. (see pros and cons) And situations change as you move through your work and home life cycle. When my boys were toddlers, it was wonderful being nearby all day long. I could have lunch with them and give out multiple hugs and kisses throughout the day, which easily trumped any office professional relationship I could ever imagine.?Now, that they are older and in school all day, I sometimes feel lonely.?Admittedly, working from home may have served its purpose as far as my children are concerned but other benefits endure, especially higher productivity.?It takes a certain personality to manage this delicate balance.?Those who can?t are truly better off in an office; but those who can, will find themselves in the enviable position of being able to bring home the bacon without ever leaving the house.????

Working from home is not a walk in the park but it has certain inalienable perks provided you can deal with the challenges.

The Pros

Energy Saver.? Not only do you save on automobile gas when you don?t drive to work, you also save a ton of personal energy.?You don?t realize how much effort you exert getting to and from the office until your commute involves a few short steps.?You can use this found time with your family, relaxing, or getting ahead of the game when needed.

Home Economics.? Gas, parking and lunch money add up.?I estimated that I saved more than $500 each month when I didn?t have these embedded costs in my workday.?I also save money on work clothes, because I basically don?t wear them unless I am traveling and have to clean myself up.

Extreme Productivity.? It is amazing how much you can accomplish when no one is popping into your office to share the latest gossip or there is no water cooler around which to talk about the movie you saw last weekend. Without interruptions, I can work at an exponentially higher speed without sacrificing quality. Since meeting and exceeding deadlines is critical to working from home, productivity is one of the most important benefits.

Maximum Flexibility.? Once you have proven yourself to be able to handle the arrangement, you are indeed able to get household chores completed during the day.?I fold laundry on conference calls and take my lunches at the kid?s school.?As long as you don?t abuse the flexibility, it is something you can, and should, enjoy.

The Cons

Guilt.? When you work at home it becomes very difficult to leave your problems at the office.?Be prepared to be drawn to work when you should be drawing a bath for your kids.?Inevitably there will be moments when you are being pulled in two different directions.?For those of us parents who feel as if they are never doing either job — parenting or working — very well, the work from home arrangement exacerbates that guilt because they are sharing the same time and space.

Isolation.? Working by yourself out of your home can be extremely lonely.?If you are the only one on a team that is not physically together regularly you need to be at peace with not being part of the daily party.?Even if everyone is working remotely the probability that you will feel like an island is high.?It is an acquired taste to which some folks never adjust.

Glass Ceiling. If you aspire to be the CEO, President, or Grand Pooh-bah of any kind in a large company that you did not start yourself, chances are that you will have to be in the office eventually to reach that final rung.?

Stigma.? There are enough work from home scams and bad experiences that many people write you off before they give you a chance.?You need to prove yourself and earn respect from those around you, more so than you would if you showed up in the office every day.?Working from home does not mean you are any less committed, but it could be wrongly interpreted that way.

It needs to be said from the outset that this is not a pro- or anti-cry it out article. How you approach sleep is as personal and complex as any aspect of parenting. And, rightly so, many moms and dads use their instinct as their guide. The intent of this article is to examine the scientific evidence that sleep training (the kind that involves a distinct period of crying to sleep) causes long-term brain damage — a very serious claim that should not be tossed around lightly.

The work of big name researchers and clinicians comes hand-in-hand with the anti-cry it out stance. For example, UCLA researcher Dr. Allan Schore is often cited as showing that stress hormones like cortisol, released during intense crying, damage nerve cells in the brain, leading to unhealthy attachments and psychological disorders. He demonstrates that a repeated pattern of unmet needs disrupts a child's stress-regulating systems and can alter the way her limbic structures process emotion.

But Schore's research is actually about how trauma, chronic neglect, or abuse affects a small person. No doubt, if ignoring distress were your every day parenting philosophy this would apply, but sleep training against the background of caring, responsive parenting, does not. In fact, this is the case with a lot of sources opposing the cry it out method — the claims of brain, personality, and attachment damage come from research conducted with grossly neglected children (some studies use data from Child Protective Services cases) not healthy children with loving parents who let them cry for an isolated timeframe.

Another well-respected source that makes the rounds on the Internet is a list of studies put together by Dr. Sears that conclude crying it out is dangerous. There are too many to explain each here, but for example, one states that infants who cry excessively have a higher incidence of ADHD, antisocial behavior, and poor school performance. When you look at the original study, though, the crying clearly has nothing to do with sleep training. The study shows that extra fussiness and subsequent crying (regardless of what parents do in response) might be a symptom of an underlying problem that could come up later in life. Sears quoted another study as showing that crying early on makes a child fussy and emotionally unbalanced. Again, the actual study says that babies who already cry a lot might be showing early signs that they are slower to develop emotional control. None of the Sears studies listed shows negative consequences as a result of a structured sleep training program.

A Harvard study often surfaces in this debate to show that CIO is bad for baby. This is not actually an original research paper, but an opinion paper based mostly on anthropological studies of parenting practices. It describes how U.S. parents emphasize independence, while mommies from other cultures co-sleep and respond faster to their little ones. It does not have any data about sleep training.

On the other hand, there isn't a robust body of evidence showing that crying it out is safe. When you think about how complicated emotional health and brain development are, it seems like a difficult conclusion to draw absolutely. Maybe certain children are more vulnerable to stressors and maybe if crying it out comes in tandem with another major change, like starting daycare or weaning, the effects might add up to a tipping point and direct a child's brain development in some way. But is there evidence of this? Not yet. It's worth noting that if it's crying we're worried about, the overall amount of crying involved in a well thought-out sleep-training program can be less than the sobs that many parents have reported when they go with a "no-cry" solution.

So the bottom line? Soothe your baby and respond to her all the time, especially in the early months. Carry her, snuggle her, feed her on demand. Being responsive and loving is a parent's most important job. In fact, it's probably the case that co-sleeping is the most natural and adaptive family arrangement — we've done it for thousands of years and, somewhere deep in their brains, our babies are probably programmed to thrive best this way. But most parents want independent sleepers and a bedtime routine that doesn't end up as a mini-trauma every night. If you decide you can't possibly bounce for another forty-five minutes on the yoga ball to get your baby to sleep, will the times that you let her cry — provided she is fed, healthy, and comfortable and you check on her — alter her brain development? There is no evidence of this so far, so you're free to make that very personal parenting choice for yourself.

Here's the dish those articles never serve up. Read it, and enjoy Halloween a little more this year, knowing that you don't need to be scared of . . .

Poisoned Candy

According to Harper's index, the number of children ever killed by doctored Halloween candy given to them by strangers equals a whopping zero. I for one plan to continue taste-testing my kids' snacks for poisons, but only the good stuff

Choking

Now that you're not worried about your kids' candy being poisoned, you can go ahead and let them eat it without fear of choking. Between 1999 and 2002, over 75% of choking deaths were people over 65. Only about 100 children die from choking each year. While many more are rushed to hospital emergency rooms, fewer than 20% of those kids choke on candy, according to the CDC.

Sugar

Afraid a candy binge will make your kids into little monsters? Experts say the link between hyperactivity and sugar just isn't there. On the other hand, if parents think their kids have had sugar, they will report more hyperactive behavior, even if the child did not actually eat any sugar. The same goes for artificial food coloring and other additives. Look the other way and let the little ones gorge on their loot.

Food allergies

Wait! What about all the potential allergens lurking in those brightly wrapped treats? Only about 6% of children and 1-2% of adults have a food allergy, and most of those are not the fatal variety. While the cause of food allergies remains a mystery, the Mayo Clinic and other experts place increasing weight on the "hygiene" hypothesis: that keeping potential allergens away from kids certainly doesn't help, and may make them more susceptible to food allergies. If you know your child has an allergy, of course you need to be vigilant, but if you've never had a reaction, count yourself lucky and indulge.

Dirt

Speaking of the hygiene hypothesis, it's probably healthy to let your kid eat that piece of candy that fell on the ground. The hygiene hypothesis states that children who are exposed to a wide variety of microorganisms at an early age develop more robust immune systems. Around here, we call the dust that invariably gets into our trail mix Vitamin Fun.

Satanic cults

Worried that some of those demons and witches prowling the street might be real? While Satanic cults make great TV, they've never been shown to exist in real life. If your child does run into a real witch on Halloween, she's likely to be an earth-loving Wiccan who might trick you into taking home some whole wheat brownies instead of the commercial chocolate.

The Internet

What Satanic ritual abuse was to my generation, Internet predators are to my kids' era: the bogeyman in the closet. The Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a Harvard-backed study that included forty-nine state's attorneys general, found that fears about Internet predation vastly outweigh the reality of this fairly rare crime. Unlike Satanic cults, creeps with computers really do exist. But they're a danger to be aware of, not lived in fear of. For most kids, the most dangerous person they'll meet on Facebook is their mom, who might well use the social networking site to find out what they were really up to last Friday night.

Abduction

Not only do you not have to worry about your child being stolen by Satanists or virtual predators, you don't have to worry about your child being stolen by any random stranger. How long would you have to leave your children outside unattended to make it statistically likely that they'd be abducted by a stranger? 750,000 years, says Warwick Cairns, author of How to Live Dangerously. Let the kids trick or treat on their own if you feel like it.

Death

Kids tend to survive. Only about 3% of the deaths in the United States each year are people under twenty-five. While tragedies do occur, it's worth remembering that kids are resilient, and that the scary things on the news make the news because they're rare. As safety guru Bruce Schneier says, "I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news -- car crashes, domestic violence -- that you should start worrying."

There is one real terror on Halloween to watch out for: cars. Kids are four times more likely to be hit by a car on Halloween than on any other night of the year, according to the National SAFE KIDS Campaign in Washington, DC. So tell your kids to look both ways, and then relax - Halloween isn't nearly as scary as you think.

Oscar and the Bat: A Book About Sound by Geoff Waring

Lots of spooky noises come alive at night that can scare kids: hooting owls, whispering wind, clashing thunder. This book explains why sound--even scary sound--is important. Plus, it will show your children how to use their ears to tell how far or near something is, and to find something, like a bird's nest or raindrops, before their eyes can actually see it.

Lesson: The world would be really boring without sound.

There's No Place Like Space! by Tish Rabe

Nighttime is synonymous with being dark and dreary, but it doesn't have to be that way. Why not teach them about just what's out there in our vast universe? Starting with the moon, this book takes kids on a super-speedy trip through our solar system, and addresses questions like, 'If the Earth is always spinning, why aren't we dizzy?' Who knows, after a few reads, you may have some night owls on your hands!

Lesson learned: Darkness isn't scary when you know what's out there.

Dark Night by Dorothee de Monfreid

This story about a boy named Felix who encounters some ferocious-looking animals in the woods will give your kids a boost of bravery before bedtime. At first, the forest animals frighten Felix but he runs into a wise rabbit that says, hey, if something scares you, scare 'em back! Halloween mask in hand, Felix turns the tables on his nemeses.

Lesson learned: Confidence goes along way in combating scary stuff.

The Scariest Monster In The World by Lee Weatherly & Algy Craig Hall

If your kids are scared of monsters under the bed, read them this funny tale about a monster that gets hiccups?and can?t get rid of them! Not only does it show that even the most menacing creatures have a soft side, we find out in the end that the monster?s scare tactics are mostly for show.

Lesson learned: Monsters aren?t that different than you and me.

What Was I Scared Of? by Dr. Seuss

You can?t go wrong with classic Dr. Seuss, and lucky for you, he?s concocted a tale sure to soothe your child?s fears of creatures lurking in the dark. Read this wacky tale about a kid who stumbles upon a pair of (literal) scared-ey pants that rides bikes, rows boats?even runs around with no feet!

Lesson learned: The things you?re most scared of are probably just as scared of you. (Bonus: The book is glow-in-the-dark!)

Creaky Old House by Linda Ashman

Got a creaky house? Read this to your kids. This story about a family with a house full of drafty shutters and dilapidated stairs shows that everything ?spooky? only became that way through years of love. (The fraying rug? That?s where Gran and Grandpa jitterbug!)

Lesson learned: A creaky house is a happy house.

Dear Royal,

Year after year parents worry that their vulnerable young daughters will be damaged by obsessions with Disney's wasp-waisted, pug-nosed role models. The princess industrial complex is unstoppable, and our little girls are drawn to it like flies to sh*t. If you manage to keep the whole thing outside of your daughter's frame of vision, we salute your efforts (and wonder if she's getting enough Vitamin D locked in that basement). If your daughter knows about princesses but doesn't give a hoot, we salute your . . . luck. The major feminist argument against The Princess is that her entire personality consists of being passive and pretty. Some worry more about the stress on beauty, for others it's the lack of agency, or the lack of cultural identity. It's all very interesting from a semiotics standpoint. But as Peggy Orenstein put it a few years ago in the Times, " maybe a princess is sometimes just a princess." In other words, what she means to you is not at all what she means to your daughter. Fighting her obsession could hurt your cause. These tinsel goddesses are characters she identifies with; negativity may be wrongly interpreted or internalized. You might teach her that you don't like what she likes, or what she imagines she is. Or, you might just show her a really easy way to rile you up. The last thing you want to do is to give the princesses the power of getting to you on top of their other powers. You can help your daughter see outside the pink satin box by providing her with a range of pretend play options, and reading her fantasy narratives that go beyond the basic happily ever after (AKA wedding) tale. You can certainly introduce her to the wonders of Wonder Woman and see if she takes the bait. (She does have a crown, after all.) But Halloween is probably not the time to challenge her interests. Halloween is an opportunity for self-expression and identification. We are believers in the self-generated costume (if not in construction, at least in concept). You can force your daughter to wear a Wonder Woman costume, but you can't make her like it. Our advice is to go with the flow and let her be whatever she feels like being for the moment, however much it abrades your feminist sensibilities. Word among parents of older girls is that the princess phase, though often torturous, passes quickly. If you don't add the element of rebellion into the mix, maybe it will run its course sooner. And hey, if you let her go as a princess now, you've got a good excuse not to let her be one again next year.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com

Click to buy Ceridwen and Rebecca's book!

For the first five years my husband and I were together, we shared a common interest in the most obscure horror movies we could find — Dario Argento, Ruggero Deodato, Gaspar Noe, Takashi Miike.?We challenged one another, ordering movies like Cannibal Holocaust from Canada because it was hard to get in the states just to see if we could stomach it.?(We could.)

Together, we would curl up on the couch, some disturbing horror fare before us, pop some popcorn and descend into madness.?We were probably the only people who looked forward to watching the decidedly B-grade Black Christmas (an abysmally bad movie) the day it came out, just one month before our daughter was born.

My friends would lament our bad taste in movies, mock our desire to see House of 1000 Corpses while they went to see Merchant Ivory Productions, but it was our taste.?Our shared sickness was powered by the same insanity that made us both skydive, bungee jump and enjoy fast cars.?We dug the adrenaline.?Unless a movie made me dig my fingers into my husband's arm and involuntarily cover my eyes, then it was not doing its job.?

And then we had children.

I knew things had changed soon after we brought her home when I perused our DVD collection and was more interested in watching Jennifer Aniston bat her eyes and act ditzy than Sheri Moon Zombie dancing sultrily to "Rocky Mountain Way" in The Devil's Rejects.?

It got worse. Breastfeeding allowed plenty of time for watching television and movies, but instead of watching complicated or disturbing shows like X-Files or 24, I started DVR-ing thirty-minute sitcoms like Hope and Faith.?Even worse??I was laughing along with the laugh track, relating to the clich?d situations the main characters found themselves encountering and trying to convince my husband that it was actually "Kind of dirty -- like, sometimes Kelly Ripa says things that could totally be taken two ways.?Isn't that funny, honey?"

My husband refused to watch Hope and Faith, but was roped into TLC's A Baby Story a couple times. "This is the worst show I have ever seen," he groaned beside me as I nursed our infant daughter.

"But look how sweet they all are," I explained through my tears (oh yes, there were tears for TLC in those early months), hoping that he would also be moved by this version of our own baby story, minus all the blood and slime and goop that made it real.?

And so when he asked, "Why do I want to watch this when I just watched the real thing?" I had no answer.

My husband was sure I had lost my mind, or at least my edge.?He started pushing the issue, bringing home bootleg copies of current horror fare, suggesting we watch Hostel again — anything to reawaken my love of torture porn.?But it was not for me, I told him, something that was confirmed one night while our infant daughter slept in the basinett upstairs and we settled in to watch one of Showtime's Masters of Horror — Takashi Miike's Imprint.?It was torture porn at its finest — fingernails, needles and pain.?I had to turn it off.

A few weeks later, I tried a Texas Chainsaw remake, figuring Imprint (which had actually not even aired on HBO due to its disturbing content) might have been a fluke.?But it happened again.?My tolerance for extreme gore had shifted.?Rob was right.?I had gone soft.

Maybe it was the hormones, the daily doses of oxytocin I was receiving via breastfeeding, that made me crave comedies with Sandra Bullock and warm-hearted romps with loveable beagles while my husband still needed the hard stuff.

Suddenly the world was all fuzzy in soft focus and anything bad happening to anyone — not just children — could happen to my child, if not now then someday.?In sixteen years she could easily be the buxom teenager running away from the ax-wielding killer.?She could one day run out of gas on a country road and ask the wrong person for a tow.?She — and I and we — were vulnerable in this world and I did not need my movies telling me just how.

It was more than that, too.?At their heart, most mainstream horror movies are misogynistic, or at least contain a whole lot of T and A.?There is usually a fine line between pornography and the most graphic horror movie, and the desire to watch both comes from the same base instinct. Before I was happy to indulge in those voyeuristic fantasies, to allow myself to get titillated by someone else's peril, but after the baby, I knew what T and A was really all about.?It was hard to watch the sweet young thing, her nubile breasts jiggling (prior to impalement or some equally hideous death) when my own were being used to feed my infant. My body was suddenly more than just a collection of parts that filled out a sweater and added spice to a violent movie.?Now it served a purpose that was so beautiful and sweet it felt perverted to enjoy it in any other way.

But I was still myself, my husband reminded me. I may have lost the stomach for the gore temporarily, but who would I be without loving the darker side of life??Even if my exploration of it was only through watching B-grade horror, it was still a quirk that was all mine.?I had always loved violence in movies and strip clubs and adrenaline.?Perhaps it makes me a female chauvinist pig, but it was my own.?Without it, I worried I was just another Stepford wife, smiling blandly and cooking non-bloody pot roast.?

It was a box set of Six Feet Under that pulled me from the brink of a future filled with cheesy reruns and dulled down comedy.?

A friend gave me all five seasons to watch during my marathon nursing sessions and as it turned out, watching a show whose main theme was that death comes for us all sooner or later was the perfect antidote to my new mom schmaltz-fest.?The Fisher family, with all of their neuroses and imperfections, reminded me that life is complicated and interesting. It is neither anesthetized like a half-hour baby story or sadistic and cruel like Irreversible.?And death is like birth, natural and expected and, sometimes, even beautiful.?

Sixty-three hours of good television saved me from a life of cheese.?While it's true that I may never want to see a woman treated like a piece of meat again, I also don't need all my entertainment served lukewarm.?I had a baby, not a lobotomy.

It is now a couple years later and although I have never renewed my once-vigorous love of all things blood and gore, I am also not rushing out to see the latest romantic comedy or watching bad sitcoms on cable television.?I do turn off the news when something particularly heinous relating to children or abuse comes on, but I went to see Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 opening weekend, just like old times, and barely flinched.?

As the little girl in Poltergeist (the '80s horror flick that awakened my love of the macabre) once said, "I'm back."?Changed, yes. But still me.?Bring on the chainsaws.

You will need:

• A small, serrated knife
• An ice cream scooper or kitchen spoon
• Vaseline
• Felt-tip marker or stencil
• Newspaper

Optional:

• Thumb tacks or push pins
• Stencil
• Fork
• Candle

Five easy steps to carving a pumpkin:

• Cut a circular opening that's bigger than your fist into the bottom of the pumpkin. Carving from the bottom up gives the pumpkin a cleaner look, plus it's safer. You won't burn your hand when you try to light a candle and place the pumpkin over it.

• Use an ice cream scooper or a kitchen spoon to clean and scrape the inside. The pumpkin wall should be no more than one inch thick.

• Draw your design on your pumpkin using a felt tip pen, or download a stencil from the Internet. Attach the stencil to your pumpkin using push pins or thumbtacks. Poke along the cut lines with a fork.

• Carve along your cut lines. If you plan to use a votive, carve a vent hole at the top of the pumpkin. (Never leave a lit jack-o-lantern unattended for any length of time.) If a piece breaks you can use toothpicks to hold it together.

• Seal your cuts by dabbing on some petroleum jelly. That will prevent browning.

Now that you've carved your pumpkin, store it in a cool dark place, not room temperature, where it will rot quickly and attract fruit flies. Happy luring!

In this exclusive excerpt from the book, they analyze the limited — and highly gender-divided — range of choices in Halloween costumes and advise that you talk to your sons about being able to be themselves, even while wearing the standard ultra-violent and superhuman outfits.

Click here for Lamb and Brown?s chapter on Halloween costumes for girls from their previous title Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketer?s Schemes.

Special Forces Jungle Fighter Child

Surf the web, flip through the many catalogs, or walk through department stores beginning in early September to look for a Halloween costume and Boyhood (that?s with a capital B) will assault you at every turn. Take him to any big box store like Walmart or Target and your little boy can pour over a dizzying array of costumes. When boiled down, his choices include scary characters, fighters, and heroes — either in super form, like Spiderman or Batman, or the real life version, like police officers, military personnel, or sports stars. For the youngest boys there?s the occasional Pooh Bear or SpongeBob, even a cute puppy or lion, but they are buried in an avalanche of ninjas, special Delta force soldiers, and Transformers.

Halloween for boys is mostly about embodying a sense of power and full-throttle action. Boys dress up as men and the version of manhood presented to them is one in which superheroes and warriors are ready to save the world. Their costumes come with every weapon he needs to control, dominate, and save, and just to prove he?s physically up for the challenge, they come complete with fake muscles. "Bulging padded ?muscles? are stitched into torso, arms and legs," announces a catalog description. "Transform your little hulk into the most powerful human-like creature."

Most powerful. Every costume says extreme action! Being a soldier is tame, almost boring, compared to being a Special Force Fighter Child, complete with ragged, ripped camo pants and "3-D foamed muscle top jumpsuit" that fakes 6-pack abs — "A great costume if you want to be Rambo." Of course few boys today know who Rambo is, aside from those who have seen Stallone?s recent R-rated sequel with the tagline: "Heroes never die; they just reload." Even if he?s not allowed to see the movie, the little boy posing in the costume, his camo headband off-kilter, his hands on his hips, his best five-year-old "don?t mess with me" expression, conveys the idea pretty well.

It?s no surprise that Halloween invites boys to dress up as the superheroes they watch in movies or sports stars they admire on TV, but it?s striking how many costumes are just variations of tough guys carrying all manner of weapons. Fighting crime like Superman and imagining you can dunk a basketball like Michael Jordan or win the Indianapolis 500 like NASCAR?s Jimmie Johnson is great fantasy, but just as pink and princess have overrun all manner of girls? costumes, boys? costumes have to come with some kind of ninja attitude and fighter paraphernalia.

And more is always, always better. More stuff, bigger muscles, tougher-sounding descriptions. Who wants to be just any ninja when you can be Shadow Ninja Bounty Hunter? This extra-tough guy costume includes a jumpsuit with muscle torso, attached belt, sword, shin guards, apron, hood, and badge. The red and black mask covers all but his eyes: "You'd better hope this ninja isn't on your trail if you're a fugitive on the run because he always gets his man."

Perusing the Halloween costume catalogs sent to homes across the country, we?re also struck by the images of little boys posing for these costumes. They must be told by the photographer to give him or her their hardest, scariest, meanest looks; to show the world how big and strong and frightening they can be, how fearless and intimidating. Like WWE stars, they model threatening poses, some showcasing their fake muscles, others in aggressive battle stance, their guns, swords, knives, light sabers, and blasters at the ready or their fake boxing gloves raised as if to strike the next blow. Many are made up to look like they?ve just been in a fight, but they?re still standing, hair messy, an eye blackened with make-up to show toughness, torn shirts and fake muscles pumped and ready for more.

Looking closer, however, we can see a hint of a smile play around the lips, even a smirk on some. The littlest boys can?t help themselves. Many smile openly at the camera, loving the fun of this playful moment when someone takes their picture and tells them how cool and tough the look. The older boys are better at the menacing looks, more practiced and polished at faking invulnerability for the camera, but even then it?s clear that this is a performance, an opportunity to imagine the glory and satisfaction of knowing all who come his way will quake in fear or run for their lives. Who wouldn?t let their son enjoy a bit of this kind of fantasy?

All boys go through this door; all girls go through that one — Halloween is about the stark commercialization of gender. It?s something we thought we?d left behind years ago. There is no neutral space, no crossing gender lines. Just look straight ahead and march, people! Even animals and insects are coded tough guy and pretty-sexy girl. No colorful butterflies and gossamer wings of dragonflies for boys. No black spiders and bats for girls. Dinosaurs and dogs are for boys. Cats, sexed up in black fishnets and full makeup, are for girls. Everything and everyone is elaborately and distinctly gendered. Halloween — at least as commercial costumes go — is not about real imagination and fantasy at all, but about the celebration of gender stereotypes. Crossing over to the other side, as some do, is possible — girls can be ninjas, boys can be dragonflies — but the distinctly male and female poses, the carefully worded descriptions in the catalogs and on websites, the clearly labeled "boy" and "girl" categories alert us all to the consequences of not dressing in a gender-appropriate way — they?ll be out of synch with their friends, breaching cultural protocol, and set up for teasing and rejection.

Of course there?s something especially pernicious about paying good money to box in our children?s worlds and limit their choices at such an early age. Fantasy for children is about trying on new roles or imagining the unusual or impossible, and Halloween is a chance to be whatever wild and crazy identity captivates him in the moment. After seeing costume after costume, he may desperately want to be Super Scary Special Forces Ninja Bounty Hunter Fighter World Saving Man. After all, marketers know the promise of all that action and power can be irresistible, especially to boys who don?t get the chance to feel that way very often (which is to say, most boys). But, given a real choice — a choice that builds action, fun, and adventure around other options — he may not. If we don?t offer the alternative, how will we know?

Since these costumes will be part of his play long after Halloween is over, help him invent stories that include those parts of him you want to nurture, stories that include a range of feelings, his own and others?. Power can be about physical strength and dominance, but it can also be the power to change someone?s point of view, persuade evil to be good, to challenge others to do good things. Remind him that every superman has his kryptonite and it?s okay to feel afraid. A superhero needs to listen, pay attention, and show compassion. These skills distinguish a true leader from a despot, and it?s never too early to help him know the difference.

PACKAGING BOYHOOD by Sharon Lamb, Ed.D., Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed. D., and Mark Tappan, Ed.D., copyright ? 2009 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin?s Press, LLC.

Halloween Costumes

Boys are dressing up as military personnel, policemen, and explorers. Girls dress up as hot little teenagers. This is no more apparent than on Halloween. Walk through Wal-Mart or look through any Halloween flyer or catalog, and you'll see pirates, firefighters, and superhero clothes offered to boys; princesses, cheerleaders, and sexy divas are offered to girls.

When we were kids, Halloween was a chance to dress up like someone you weren't. It was a time to be a little transgressive, to cross the usual boundaries set in place by social mores and convention. At Halloween's gloaming, the powerless became superheroes, the young became wrinkled and bent, the poor donned dazzling jewels, and people of the day became monsters of the night — vampires, witches, and all manner of ghastly ghouls. Sometimes girls became mustached men, and boys became big-breasted women, just for the absurdity and the fun of it! We raided our parents' closets and makeup supplies, tore up sheets for bandages, painted lipstick blood down our cheeks, or dug out Dad's big rubber boots to invent someone outlandish. The streets resembled something out of Night of the Living Dead, save for a few oddly bright Tweety Birds and Cinderellas.

Halloween is still a chance to be who you aren't, but anyone with kids can tell you that costumes have become something of an art form. No wonder all the kids want them; Mom's closet looks drab by comparison. They are elaborately accessorized affairs made of every fabric and material known to humankind. Costumes come with things like hats, boas, glasses, wands, microphones, wigs, swords, slippers, purses, pom-poms, wings, medallions, scarves, crowns, handcuffs, whistles, badges, and broomsticks. They have muscles sewn in, plush animal-like fur, foam chest armor, layers of chiffon, and fake leather or metal. Some are full-fledged fantasies that parents who can afford it pay $20 to $40 to see come alive on their child. (Sixty dollars will buy you a bride's costume, complete with "giant diamond ring." Alas, there is no groom's costume in sight.)

But there's one obvious way that Halloween costumes lack imagination. Go ahead and pick out the boy and girl costumes from the following list of catalog descriptions:

"Pow! Bang! Batman to the rescue."

"Evening star enchants everyone."

"The Gladiators enter the arena, and the crowd goes wild!"

"Made in Heaven."

"Shadow Panther Cyber Ninja, protector of the galaxy!"

"Chic pink pussy cat is spotted at all the best soirees."

You get the idea. Halloween has become less about being who you aren't for a night and more about fantasizing that you are the ultra-girl or uberboy the material world says you should want to be. Boys are tough, active superheroes, ninjas, and warriors, ready to save the empire, the world, and the universe, complete with fake muscles to prove their manhood. "Ask the incredible hulk over to your house — but don't get him angry," warns one catalog. "Bulging padded 'muscles' are stitched into torso, arms, and legs. . . . Transform your little hulk into the most powerful human-like creature." Little girls don't "take on evil" or have "bold adventures" or even "incredible fun." They don't save, capture, leap, strike fear, or stop enemies — they don't do anything. Even Wonder Woman, a rare exception, only "encourages fortitude and self-confidence." That she does so in a spaghetti-strapped leotard with beige stretch nylons and what resembles a bikini bottom suggests the only thing she's ready to battle are Halloween-night goose bumps.

According to these costumes sold in department and drugstores, in catalogs and online, girls get their power almost solely from their looks. They just are — "puuurfectly coordinated," "darling," full of "lightness and beauty." If they act at all, it's to "sizzle," "slither," "rock the stadium," or "stalk the stage in zebra stripes." They are lotus blossoms and beautiful princesses. (And have little to do and no sense of direction. "Which way to the castle?" asks one girl featured in a costume catalog.) They are dancing queens, pink cheerleaders, divas, fairies, and Barbies, Barbies, Barbies. Girls are beautiful to behold in their short skirts, full skirts, grass skirts, and even pirate skirts (something no self-respecting pirate — and there were real women pirates — would wear) and off-the-shoulder gowns and lace-up bodices, made of shimmering satin and pink sequins. Even the more traditional Halloween-type costumes speak to the ultrafeminine and increasingly sexy — pretty witches and gothic princess, sexy genies and hot devils who aren't scary but plan to "paint the town red in a stretch velvet leotard with fluffy marabou trim." As one of our surveyed girls told us, "I wore a devil outfit because it was simple and looked sexy."

Is it as limited and narrow as it seems at first glance? Web sites sort their costumes explicitly along gender lines, with categories like "Princesses and Barbie" and "Star Wars and Sci-Fi," or even more pointedly "Girl Costumes" and "Boy Costumes." When we checked a promisingly neutral "When I Grow Up" category on one site, we found the same gender divide. There parents can find fifty-five costumes for boys and only twenty-two for girls. Of these, fifteen are cheerleaders, divas, and rock stars. Included in this "when I grow up" section was our number one thumbs-down nomination. Don't all parents wish their daughter will grow up to be a "French maid?"

There is something especially pernicious about all this. Fantasy for children is about trying on new roles, about imagining the unusual or impossible, about wearing whatever wild and crazy identity suits their fancy or captivates them at the moment. Why would we want — and, indeed, pay good money ? to limit kids in such stereotypical ways? (We're including the littlest kids here. Don't forget to dress your infant in a baby Hulk, Spiderman, or Superman costume.) And why especially on Halloween? After all, isn't Halloween the night when the veil between the worlds is thin, when the real and imagined come close to merging? It's the one magical night when we can expect imagination to wander far and wide, to let carnival and spectacle overtake convention. Do your daughter a big favor and encourage her to see herself as something other than the pretty princess, the sexy diva, the veiled genie, or the glittery fairy. Help her imagine that she has power over more than how she looks, how well she serves her master, or what prince she attracts. This Halloween, go ahead and raid the closet with her. Imagine that anything is possible. If her heart is set on glitter, at least help her imagine a feisty fairy who takes on the magical realm's evil dragon, a butterfly that saves the insect world, or a princess who can use a map to find her own way to the ball.

PACKAGING GIRLHOOD by Sharon Lamb, Ed.D., and Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed. D., copyright ? 2007 by the authors and reprinted by permission of St. Martin?s Press, LLC.

In 2007 writers Sharon Brown and Lyn Mikel Lamb published Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes, a book about the messages girls get from marketers and what parents can do about it. From the beginning, they also wanted to write a book about boys.

In their new book, Packaging Boyhood: Saving Our Sons from Superheroes, Slackers and Other Media Stereotypes, writers Brown, Lamb and Mark Tappan analyze all types of data, all the way down to the valentines Johnny and Joey can give to classmates and how they're riddled with menace (one Transformer card features the police car robot shouting: "I've been looking for you"). 

The Valentine's Day cards are just one tiny example of how stereotypes and other media images play out to boys. The message that boys get is that they have to be strong — and not just strong, SUPER strong. They have to play games, but they always have to be the winner.

What does this mean for boys? And what options are left out? What happens when they don't win? If they're not strong? Why exactly is a PG-13 movie (Batman: The Dark Knight) linked to T-shirts in 2T?

It's a story in which those with the most power too often have the wrong kind of power — they are the bullies, the narcissistic athletes, "dogs" or "players" — the ones who call the shots and get the scantily clad, booty-jiggling music video girls. It's a story that teaches boys that they need to avoid humiliation at all costs, seek revenge if wronged, dress to impress and intimidate, be tech-savvy, show wealth and take risks all while pretending that they don't care about any of it.

Think this doesn't apply to your little tot? In one hilarious and frightening example, the authors use movie quotes and invite readers to tell whether they were spoken by Rambo or Raphael, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. (The quotes are equally violent.)

Authors Lyn Mikel Brown and her husband Mark Tappan talked to Babble about what to do and what you can say to your kids to combat the media bombardment.— Jennifer V. Hughes

Your work has turned me into an advocate. I'm always pointing out things from your first book, like how few classic children's books feature girls as the hero.  But I often get the "what's the big deal" response. So what if a kid's t-shirt has Spiderman on it? Who cares if boys are obsessed with sports?

Lyn: The series of messages and a kind of typing about boys that happens pretty early on sets up an ideal that is pretty narrow and pretty hard for boys to fit into. The ideal of always winning and being a superhero closes out a whole range of options, for example, being able to talk about being vulnerable or feelings, the complex things we want to support in our children that make them healthy as they grow up.

Mark, how did you see this kind of thing growing up?

Mark: Things have really changed since I was a boy. One of the things we noticed was how pervasive it is, in toys, movies, books, everywhere. The other side of it is the slacker stereotype, the "I don't care," Bart Simpson character. It's the alternative to the hyper super macho. If you don't measure up to that, you can be a slacker and still be popular.

You talk in your book about how boys are pushed towards certain subjects, superheroes, for example. What's so bad about boys identifying with Spiderman? He's a good guy, he works hard, he's flawed and human?

Lyn: Part of the problem is that the old comic books have been transformed over time. Now they're these over-the-top action movies. There is a lot to like about Spiderman and for the most part he's good. But now there's also bad Spiderman, there's Batman and The Dark Knight. It's gotten a lot darker, a lot more scary and more dramatic. These are PG-13 movies that are really on the border of an R, and yet they're marketed to the littlest boys.

Mark: We're not against superheroes, but if it's the only thing that boys have, then it's a problem. Boys should have a range of toys to play with and people to identify with. Superheroes are a place for parents to have a conversation with their sons. In our culture, it's just sort of accepted — what's the big deal, boys will be boys. It's different for girls; we have a sense that girls need to be protected. But it's almost as if boys don't matter as much. They'll goof off in school, they'll cause trouble, they'll raise hell, they'll fight and it's normal. We think the media plays a role in that; it's not just boys being boys in a natural sense.

I do think that there are some inherent things about boys: they usually are more high-energy, they usually do gravitate toward a ball instead of a baby doll. How do you accommodate a boy's natural tendencies and still adhere to some of your ideals?

Lyn: What we're talking about is the way that energy is translated into a very narrow stereotype. Why is action translated into violence? Action can be channeled in other ways.

So how do you try to address some of these issues of violence? Do you ban Bakugan? Say yes to Spiderman but no to X-Men? How do you decide?

Mark: There are choices parents have to make about what's appropriate. We'd like parents to pay more attention to the ratings of movies, for one, so they don't let their kids see PG-13 movies just because they got a Batman toy in their Happy Meal. We want parents to talk to their sons so the violence is a topic for conversation, not something that has to be banned. Ask them: "What does this mean? Why do you like it?"

Lyn: The important thing is to listen. We don't always know why they are attracted to something, say violent video games. One of Mark's students helped us see that boys often like these games because of the complex storylines. As parents, if we listen to them, we can help channel that in other ways, help them find other ways to get that complex storyline.

When it comes to violence — what is the difference between what kids see today and what we watched? I remember adults thinking that Wile E. Coyote trying to blow up the Road Runner was too violent.

Lyn: We have so many examples of how things are different from the way they used to be. We were totally struck by Nerf and how big the guns are now. There are also Legos now where it's not about creatively making what you want to make, it's about making the Transformer. We looked at racetracks; it used to be that the idea was to keep the car on the track, now the idea is to crash. We saw the word "hyper" in a lot of toys and other marketing; even the name has to be over the top.

In your previous book, Packaging Girlhood, one thing that stunned me was the part about how children's games show — by a huge margin — the boy winning or playing an active role with the girl as a passive observer rooting for the boys. Tell me one of the things that you were really surprised to discover in your research for Packaging Boyhood.

Lyn: With this book, after a while, we just felt like it was all too much. We started thinking of it as this frantic, desperate need to impose this on boys. I was thinking of all the little boys in their little bodies confronted with this all the time and the experience that they have to somehow live up to all of this in the guise of fun and action. It has to feed a kind of anxiety

Mark: Certainly for marketers, that's the technique: you increase someone's anxiety about not being pretty or smart or strong enough and then you sell them a product that will make them feel better. You tie that into the cultural anxiety about masculinity. One of the examples of that is, strangely enough, energy drinks. You start to listen to all those names — Full Throttle, No Fear, Monster, Tiger, Rock Star — it's that again and again, this desperate sense of you're big enough, you're strong enough, you're man enough, you're hyper enough to prove something.

I thought it was really interesting how you point out that there are a lot of great shows for young boys (and girls) — WonderPets, Thomas — where the focus is not all on competition and violence and destruction, with good messages about teamwork and cooperation and affection. But then it seems to go straight to X-Men. At least girls get My Little Pony in between. Why is there so little middle ground for boys?

Lyn: I think that's right. Not only that, but they go right into the tween shows, too. It's interesting how much the show "Drake and Josh," mirrors the show "Two and a Half Men": one is the player, and one is the straight man. The other shocking thing about [shows directed to boys] is the idea of drinking, how much we saw boys' characters getting "drunk." SpongeBob gets "drunk" on ice cream; on "The Suite Life" they get "drunk" on soda. In Toy Story, they get "drunk" on tea, in Open Season, they get "drunk" on candy bars. It becomes a right of passage for boys, and it goes to the littlest boys, that out of control, action thing.

You address the issue of race more in this book than the last one. What have you found about how race is addressed in movies, TV, and other media?

Lyn: I think we were aware of the fact that we didn't address race much in Packaging Girlhood, but at the same time I think it's more of an issue for boys because a lot of the hyper masculine images are of men of color, in sports or music. One of the big concerns was in reading, it was hard to find books, except history books, where boys of color were the protagonists or the leaders. It's pretty rare when you see that.

Mark: It happens in movies too. The character of color is typically the sidekick, like Donkey in Shrek .

Lyn: Of course, the lead character in Open Season is played by a person of color . . .

But of course he's too drunk to do much good.

Lyn: Exactly, he's getting drunk and saying things like "Bros before does" (referring to the adult version, Bros before Hos). That's the kind of coded stuff designed to bring in adults, but it really does sell out boys in terrible ways.

So what's your advice to parents, especially those with young sons, like four or five?

Lyn: That is the time when parents can introduce simple concepts of how they're being sold something, what a stereotype is. You can guide them away from things and channel their energy into more constructive things. The hope is that if we can do that with little kids, as they get old enough, they'll do the talking. We want to have a voice in their head with all that other media stuff.