Half Changed World

If you’re on any parenting listserves, you’ve probably seen this YouTube video already.  It was made by the family of a little boy who was killed in a car accident; even though he was in a booster seat and belted in, the seat belt failed, and he was thrown from the car.  The video is a tearjerker, and argues for keeping kids in car seats with 5-point harnesses for as long as possible.

A friend forwarded me the video today, and I responded with this link from CarSeat.org, which points out that seat belt failure is extremely rare.  She responded that both CarSeat.org and AAP recommend keeping kids in car seats until they reach the height/weight limits, and so that it seems like a "no-brainer" to use a seat with higher limits if one is available.

I had to think for a while to figure out why I had such a strong reaction to this argument. Part of it is defensiveness — at 6, D is shorter and lighter than many 4 year olds.  He’s probably going to need a booster until he’s 12.  Or maybe 21.* But we haven’t made him stay in a car seat.  He’s happier in the booster, and it’s vastly easier to move it from car to car.  I don’t like being made to feel like a neglectful parent as a result.

But it’s also that I object to the idea that we’re supposed to protect against any risk we can, no matter how low probability.  It’s the same reason I’m not a fan of cord blood banking.  So much of parenting seems to be driven by fear these days, and I don’t want to buy into that world view.

* Heck, I sit on a wedge that is essentially an adult booster seat when I drive our older car, which doesn’t have fully adjustable seats — I’m 5′ even, and without the wedge, the curve in the seat hits my back in the wrong places.

Two years ago, I was horrified to read at Not Quite Sure that one was expected to provide Valentines for the kids at preschool.  I continued to pretend that I hadn’t gotten the memo, and didn’t worry too much about the one or two kids who did distribute them.

Two weeks ago, D’s kindergarten teacher sent home a letter saying that they wouldn’t be having a Valentine’s Day party, but that we could, if we chose, provide Valentines to be distributed.  The letter said that if we did so, we should provide them for all the kids in the class (and a list was included) and that they should be pre-addressed since the teachers didn’t have time to address them for us.

As it happens, we had bought a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts last month and they had included a pack of 12 donut-themed Valentine’s, each one with a coupon for a free donut. D thought this sounded like a fine idea, so Tuesday night he sat down and carefully wrote his classmates names onto the cards and signed them all.  Of course, there was no school yesterday, so the celebration was delayed.  After reading the V-Day posts at Uterine Wars and On Balance, I wondered what we’d be getting back.  Handmade cards with glitter hearts?  Bags of candy?

As it turns out, D received one bag of candy, two Cars-themed cards, one Spiderman-themed card, and one Thomas-themed card.  (All of these of the sort sold by the dozen at CVS.)  So we neither upped the ante embarassingly or fell short.  Does it make me a bad mommy to think that I’m going to look back on this nostalgically if we move to a better school district with more involved parents?

Having survived our weekend of travel, I’m back with reviews of some of the products we used:

1)  Dramamine.  I decided to be proactive about N’s tummy and gave him dramamine before the flights.  I don’t know that it helped, but he didn’t puke on either flight.  But what idiot decided that chewable dramamine — which is most likely to be used by kids who haven’t figured out how to take pills — should be packaged such that the recommended dose for a small child is 1/4 to 1/2 a pill?  Particularly now that you can’t bring a knife on a plane? It doesn’t help that each pill is in one of those ridiculous bubble packs.

2)  The sit-n-stroll.  As a car seat, it’s a great stroller, and as a stroller, it’s a great car seat.  But it beats the pants off of trying to lug any other toddler car seat around an airport.  The weather was crappy on Friday, and we got through security 30 minutes before our flight was due to take off.  And of course our flight was at the furthest possible gate.  We strapped N into the seat and just cruised through the place at a trot.  (Our flight was delayed, so it turned out not to matter, but we would have made the flight if had been on time.)  You don’t want this as your only car seat — the seat belt has to go over it, rather than through it, so you have to refasten it every time you use it — but if you fly with a toddler more than once a year, it’s totally worth it.

3) Trunki.  I saw this ride-on suitcase for kids in a magazine last fall, and thought it was incredibly cute.  I found out that the MOMA store sold it, and suggested it to my parents as a hanukah present for the boys.  We’ve used them around the house (N adores using his to store all his treasures, and sometimes insists on sleeping with it) but this was the first time we tried them in an airport.  The good — the boys liked riding on them, and they charmed everyone who saw them.  The straps make them easy to carry when you hit the escalator and need them off the ground.  The bad — they don’t corner well, so they’re not good for when you’re really in a rush.  And the latches don’t stay shut.  Fortunately, we had used them enough to see the problem with the latches, and had bought luggage straps to wrap around them and keep them shut.

Update: when I wrote this post, I also emailed the company and told them the latches didn’t stay shut.  They asked me what colors we had, and I said one of each.  No further word, until late April, when replacement latches showed up — direct from the UK — with a cute letter saying that they’re sorry our trunkis were "feeling poorly."  The boys were just thrilled.

Update 2: Trunki is now listed for sale on Amazon, although they don’t seem to have any in stock yet.  Order it in blue or pink!

Feeling frazzled, so you get some bullets tonight:

• The blog world is buzzing over the story of the family who got kicked off of an AirTran flight because the little girl wouldn’t sit in her seat and so the flight couldn’t take off.  Assuming that the story is being reported more or less accurately, I basically agree with Mir.  I can’t promise you that my kids won’t make noise, but I can get them in their seats.  And most of the parents commenting at On Balance seemed to agree as well.  But a few seemed to take it as an opportunity to vent their spleen about crying kids, which is a different story entirely.  Yeah, I’d rather not be trapped in an airplane with a crying kid too, but you don’t always get what you want.  Trust me, the parents are even less happy about it than you are.
• As it happens, we’re flying AirTran this weekend to attend a family event.  My boys are both quite excited about flying, and I’m hopeful that they’ll be reasonably well behaved.  D’s been on a 16 hour flight, so an hour and a half shouldn’t be a problem.  But of the 4 times that N has flown in his life, he’s thrown up on two of them.  We’re bringing a big box of wipes and extra clothes, but is there anything else we should be doing?  Is there a nonprescription anti-airsickness drug that is safe for kids and actually works?
• I’ve learned about a local farm that sells grass-fed beef and lamb and makes deliveries nearby.  After reading The Omnivore’s Dilemna, I want to give this a try.  But I have no idea what to get that a) won’t bankrupt us and b) will give us a sense of why it’s worth the extra money and hassle.  Here’s the price list — what should I get and how should I cook it?
• I’ve mostly stopped worrying about my stats, but I happened to take a look at them this afternoon and discovered that I got over 2,000 hits on Monday, which is about 4 times what I usually get and more than 2 times my previous high.  I think it’s because of this article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  This is far more than the increase in hits I got last year when quoted in the NY Times.  I think the difference is that the Post-Intelligencer used a hotlink to the post it referred to, which the Times never does.

Here are some links that readers have recently sent me:

• Parenting as a wiki (e.g. everyone’s got an opinion and they’re all different.)
• Investment banks woo employees with shorter hours
• A new Wharton program for women with MBAs and other graduate degrees returning to the workforce after a 2-7 hiatus.  (And yes, it does say women.  I don’t know what they’d say if a SAHD applied.)
• A blog post from Prarie Mary on how educational outcomes on reservations were affected by casino money.
• An article on the growth in SAHDs in Scotland.

And don’t forget to send your comments on the FMLA.

I’m not in the mood to write tonight, so I’ll just share some links:

1) I really liked Rowan Crisp’s comment on the sHillary post at Pandagon:

"I was told recently that “as a feminist” I had a duty to vote for her. I stopped laughing long enough to ask if I had to vote for Condi Rice if she ran, too. Funnily enough, I never got an answer on that one.

"I want someone who will fight for national healthcare. I want someone who will stop wrapping themselves in the flag and the bible to justify horrors. I want someone who will obliterate the movement towards a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. I want someone who will ridicule DOMA for what it is: a limitation on the right of legal, consenting adults to contract freely.

"I’d also like a pony. 🙁 "

Hillary isn’t my first choice for the Democratic nominee.  She’s not even my second.  But I feel like there’s a level of vitriol against her on the left that is totally out of proportion to the compromises that she’s actually made. 

2)  Blogging for Choice posts from Cecily and Bitch, PhD.  And Wealhtheow writes about Virginia’s "controversial" bill to ensure that anti-abortion laws don’t ban contraception as well.

3)  And via Funds for Writers: Small Markets, I thought some of my readers might be interested in this call for submissions of speculative fiction about futuristic motherhood. 

What do you imagine the function of motherhood to be? How do you think the image of motherhood will change? How do you think the image of motherhood will stay the same? What possible customs, norms or laws will be in place in the future that would have an impact on changing or affecting mothers? How will science and technology affect pregnancy, birth, and child rearing? How might full social equality affect childcare in the home and workplace? How does a lack of social equality in a highly technological society affect pregnancy, birth, and childcare? How about in a future culture with a highly evolved social order but low technology?

I was intrigued by this story in the Washington Post on Monday, reporting on a study that examined the cost of childbearing on parental health. The researchers took advantage of the huge amount of geneological data collected by the Mormon church, and studied the effects of family size on both parental and child health.

As you’d expect, the odds of dying in childbirth or immediately thereafter rose for women the more children they had borne.  But the odds of dying in the next year rose significantly for women even after the first few months, and for men as well.  In an online Q and A, the reporter said that the findings held across imputed socioeconomic status, which suggests that it’s not just a matter of having too many mouths to feed.  The article suggests that the findings may be a sign of the health impacts of stress.  Children in large families were also more likely to die than those in small families, possibly due to inadequate supervision.

I wasn’t surprised to see that children were more likely to die in childhood if one of their parents died before they reached age 5.  I was surprised that this finding was so much stronger for maternal death than paternal death.  I can see how maternal death would be a disaster for an infant, but my stereotypical image of pioneer families makes me think that loss of a father would be a greater disaster for older children.  But there may have been more social support for widows and their children than I imagine.  (I also think there may be some bias introduced by the sample design, which is limited to couples who were each married only once; my impression is that both widows and widowers tended to remarry out of simple economic necessity.)

Given both smaller family sizes today and better medical care, I’m not sure if this study has any practical implications today, but I thought it was interesting.

Last year, the Washington Post magazine had a long article about a children’s entertainer called The Great Zucchini.  We discussed it, and the general phenomenon of children’s birthday parties here and here.  Well, last week we learned that the Great Zucchini himself was performing at the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse, so off we went this afternoon.

He’s funny.  The kids absolutely adored it.  D laughed until his juice went down the wrong way and he choked.  Although he’s billed as a magician, the act includes very little stage magic — it’s mostly slapstick.  He poured water on himself, got attacked by a slinky, threw diapers at the audience, told them NOT to dance in the aisles, made a child "disappear" by hiding behind the curtains, etc.  But it’s nothing terribly original, just a consistent willingness to be silly.  T’s main reaction was "I could do that."  And he could — at D’s party last year, he impressed the kids by juggling chocolate cake.

This year for D’s birthday, we’re just taking a few kids to Port Discovery.  It’s enough of a treat for him that he doesn’t mind not having a big party, and the logistics are far easier.  We need to check with his teacher, but we think we’re still allowed to bring cupcakes to school on his actual birthday to share with his whole class, as long as they’re consumed in the cafeteria and not the classroom.

I’m not quite as enthusiastic about Babble as RebelDad is.  Yes, I’m glad to see a parenting site that is making a serious outreach to dads.  But they seem to be trying a little too hard to be hip.  Earlier in the week, it seemed like every other post on their front page was gratuitously cursing or referring to sex toys.  Oooh how naughty.  It made me think about what Andi Buchanan wrote recently about "the escalation of cool" or how being a hipster parent can be as much of a confining role as being a saccharine mommy who just loves pastels.

I feel like the Babble people read that annoying SFChronicle article about how boring mommies are and want to show that parents can still drink, curse and wear black.  Er, yes, but so what?  Is that really still a radical concept?  And is it really that exciting?

I know I’ve linked to it before, but if you haven’t read Being Daddy’s Square: The Unhip Parent’s Manifesto, go check it out.  I agree with RebelDad that being a parent shouldn’t mean giving up everything else that’s important in your life (#4 on his list), but if you go into parenting expecting that your life isn’t going to change at all, you’re shortchanging your child AND yourself.

Maybe after Babble’s a bit more settled, the authors will stop defining themselves by what they’re not and start talking about who they are.  I’ll check back in a month or so.

I burned my thumb cooking tonight, so can’t type very much.  Instead, here are links to two surveys that I’ve taken recently.

• One is the WorkLife Wizard which collects information about people’s jobs, industries, and the types of organizations they work for, and then asks a set of questions about working conditions.  There were some interesting questions about perceptions of male and female coworkers, which I’m curious as to how they’re going to be used. It’s sponsored by the Labor and Worklife program at Harvard Law School, and my understanding is that a consortium of groups is doing similar surveys in several countries.  If you fill out the survey, you can get your work-life question answered by their advisor.
• The other, via Raising WEG, is the Moms as People survey being conducted by Suniya Luthar, a professor at Teachers College, Columbia University.  Luthar’s work is not only the basis for Judith Warner’s recent blog post on the dissatisfaction of highly educated and affluent moms, but also for the article a bit back on the drinking playdate. And yes, she asks an awful lot of questions about the various ways that one can self medicate.  As usual with these things, my experience doesn’t fit nicely into the categories available (she asks about in-person and phone contact with friends, but not about on-line connection), but it made me think.