Strollerderby : reading to your kids

You Can't Scare Your Kids Out of an Eating Disorder

JeanneSager — Fri, 15 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

They seem like the perfect mix of over-the-top drama and real-life cautionary tales to scare your kids straight. But all those books out there warning about the dangerous world of eating disorders?

Could be helping your kids advance their disordered eating.

A look at some books written for teens that fall in the "children's lit" category over on the New York Times' Well Blog hit home for me especially because I WAS one of those teen girls who, pardon the pun, but ate up the stories of teenage bulimics. I wanted to read about someone I could identify with.

But even as I read the horrors of girls whose bodies had begun to grow excess hair to make up for the lack of fat to keep them warm, of girls who landed in hospitals weighing what they did as elementary schoolers, I wasn't consciously thinking "ooh, can't wait until I land in a clinic for the eating disordered, wonder if my parents' insurance will cover the costs." What I was thinking was "interesting, she eats a brightly colored food first so when she throws up, she'll know by the color in the toilet that she's gotten to the bottom of her stomach contents."

It's why today I'm loathe to tell my daughter horror stories to scare her straight on anything. Because before you reach the awful ending, there are always the details that fascinate, that often overwhelm kids with their one-track minds, that are entirely more enticing than the sobering after-thought of a consequence.

Although I'm wary of blaming a book for a child's struggle with an eating disorder (ninety nine times out of one hundred, the seeds for that have already been sewn), just as I scoff at the idea that a video game is solely to blame for a child's violent tendencies, any book, movie, game, what have you, that shares intimate details of how someone navigates a dangerous path is a potential how-to manual in the hands of our kids.

It's why I read this warning about eating disorder books as just another reason parents can't pass the buck off onto a book, a movie, a CD. If you're going to keep your kid from disordered eating, get wise to what it means to have an eating disorder, find out the warning signs and then TALK to your kids. Let them read books, sure, but read them yourselves so you know what's in them. Then talk about them.

Because if all you're doing is trying to scare your kids into being good, it isn't going to work.

Image: UniversityofWisconsin

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The Demise of the Fairy Tale

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Do you read traditional fairy tales to your kids? If so, you are in a dwindling group of parents. According to a survey of 3,000 British parents, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel are increasingly being replaced by happier modern favorites like Gruffalo and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. 25 percent of parents choose not to ever read fairy tales to their kids and 65 percent do not choose fairy tales for bedtime stories.

According to the parents who object to fairytales, Cinderella is not empowered enough. Rapunzel is “too dark.” Little Red Hiding is a bad role model for kids because she walks alone in the woods. And one-tenth of parents believe Snow White is offensive because of the un-PC term “dwarf.”

I can certainly understand the need to carefully introduce your kids to fairy tales—some of them are pretty scary, and I’ll be the first to admit that being rescued from a life of servitude by a handsome prince is no healthy goal for a young girl. But if you’re going to shield your child from Cinderella so as to avoid imparting gender stereotypes, you would have to shield her from nearly all pop culture. If Little Red Riding Hood is violent or scary, even commercials for the latest Superman movie are downright terrifying. And if Snow White wrongly teaches young women the value of being the “fairest in all the land,” Bratz dolls wrongly teach girls to be the most scantily clad in all the land.

This is not to say that we should just give up on fighting media that gives kids the wrong messages, but perhaps Jack and the Beanstalk is not the best battlefield.

Photo: The Daily Mail

Book Reviewers Take Kid Books Too Seriously

JeanneSager — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:27:00 GMT

Sometimes a book for kids is just a book for kids. There is no existentialist reason for being hidden within the words. There is no parallel to the White House's poor handling of the economy in a parent denying their child a toy on the trip to the store. There is just a mom and a kid learning that sometimes you can't always get what you want (although, in the immortal words of Jagger, "you just might find, you get what you need" . . . thank you, please, tip your waiters).

Saturday's mocking of New York Times children's book reviewers by Gawker took me straight back to high school. Raised on a back road with few kids for playdates, no TV to watch and a brother who was significantly younger, I was the student English teachers saw coming from a mile away. There wasn't a book in the high school library I hadn't read. The clerk at our local library started turning a blind eye to my forays into the "grown-up" section of the library when I was around nine and fed up with reading the same thing over and over. In short, I wasn't the kid they needed to make reading assignments to in order to ensure I was reading.

That didn't make me any less susceptible to the laissez faire approach most kids take to assigned reading. I blame the teachers (not all of them, there were a few good eggs in the henhouse). Breaking books down to discover the supposed nuance behind every word, ferreting out the hidden psychoses of the authors, they managed to suck every bit of pleasure from books I would otherwise have devoured like a piece of chocolate cake. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was one of my pre-teen favorites, reread on days when I too wished I could hand over my chores to my friends in exchange for some cold hard cash. Hashing and rehashing of Huck Finn a few years later inside a classroom turned me against Mark Twain for good. What could have been a compelling tale of river adventure - to a girl growing up in a river town of her own - was instead an arduous dissection of the importance of money for survival, the dangers of the river and a debate on superstitions.

Valid subjects of high school study, to be sure, but at the cost of losing would-be readers? With me, teachers were fortunate. They might have lost me on Twain, but they'd pick me up again on Orwell or Bronte. Nothing could keep me from a book.

It's the kids who don't walk into a school building with a love of literature who are being hurt by taking books too seriously too early. Who wants to read a book when you're being told you read it wrong? That the princess in your fairy tale is supposed to give your four-year-old a keener eye for determining whether Prince Charles should truly ascend the throne?

How about letting them enjoy the ride so one day they can reap the benefits?

Image: DailyMail

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Were You a Highlights Kid?

JeanneSager — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:01:00 GMT

The first thing I'd do was flip to the Hidden Picture. My crayon poised to circle a shoe in a tree or a shovel in a pant leg, I'd pour over the page like I was about to discover the secret to unlock the world's candy supply. I was a Highlights Kid - and now I know I'm in good company.

The publishing company behind the magazine piled in pediatrician's offices across the country has launched a Website for those of us who are now thumbing through the mag we read as kids with our own brood. I Was a Highlights Kid allows everyone to share their favorite memories, Goofus and Gallant stories, and tales of their published doodle. Along with us little people, Highlights will be offering the stories of some of today's best known authors and illustrators who got a boost in their childhood when their tales were printed in the pages of their favorite magazine. They started this week with essays from Freakonomics author and New York Times essayist Stephen J. Dubner and Poodlena author E.B. McHenry.

Already the tales are pouring in. Will you add yours? Better yet, will your kids one day add theirs?

Image: Highlights for Children

Strollerderby : reading to your kids

You Can't Scare Your Kids Out of an Eating Disorder

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The Demise of the Fairy Tale

Book Reviewers Take Kid Books Too Seriously

Were You a Highlights Kid?

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Happy Birthday Cookie Monster: C is Still For Cookie Thirty-Nine Years Later

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