I can especially relate to the moment he shares with his daughter who, after throwing up on his laptop battling a norovirus, reacts like I could imagine mine doing. Just when you think you know what you are being called on to do as a parent (in this case, make your kid comfortable while they battle a bug), parenthood throws you a small curveball and you realize that you are being called upon to do something else entirely.

I go into my daughter’s room to kiss her goodnight and find her sweating under blankets. Her best friend has lately found other kids he’d rather play with at school, and in her sleepy state that’s the first thing on her mind. Through her dream haze she says to me, “It’s good that he wouldn’t play with me today; I might have made him sick.” Here I’ve been worried I upset her with my reaction to what happened, but heavier things weigh on her tiny heart.

“I just want you to know that I love you, and that my computer isn’t broken after all.”

“Okay, Pops.”

“And don’t you worry about him. He doesn’t know how much fun he’s missing.”

A few lines later, musing about his angry reaction to losing his laptop, he says;

But how could you be mad at her? You might as well be mad at the wind.

Later on, an event happens that puts losing your laptop to a kid vomiting on it into perspective, and presents another reality of what parents are called upon to deal with, in this case it is Jim’s Mother-in-Law. Here’s hoping the follow-up post has some good news with regards to that situation.

This is wonderful writing, and a post that every soon to be Dad should read.

It’s a Wonderful Life, in particular, seems to have a real cultural relevance today. Not only are the themes of the movie timeless (the importance of community and the power of one), but the setting for the movie seems so contemporary considering the events of the past year. While we in Canada have been somewhat shielded by the financial turmoil south of the border, the past years financial uncertainties have certainly rippled across the border. Considering the movie is well over 60 years old, the story of corporate greed, failed banks and financial institutions, and foreclosed homes is the stuff that we are, sadly, read about everyday.

The entire movie is available online or watch it below.

via Open Culture’s list of movies you can watch for free online.

I have my first parent teacher night later this week with my daughter’s kindergarten teacher and am looking for some input (particularly from any teachers who may read this) as to what makes a good parent teacher interview?

This won’t be the first time we have met the teacher. Both my wife and I have gone on a few field trips with the class, and have volunteered in the classroom so we already have a relationship with her. But this will be the first  “formal” evaluation where we can sit down for 15 minutes and talk specifically about The Girl and her learning.

So, as a teacher, what do you hope will happen in those 15 minutes? What are you going to try to get across and what do you like to see a parent ask when they are sitting across the desk from you during the interview? And for parents who have done this a few times, what do you think makes a good parent teacher interview?

Image: v2.194: September 10th (Good Day for Mommies) by Phony Nickle. Used under CC license.

I know, it seems like such a little thing, but again and again these types of semantics are important as they reflect the underlying belief that Moms are the only ones in the family that might be interested in information about parenting. In other words, Dads don’t care.

ARGGGGHHHHHHH.

Look, YouTube, I know it’s not intentional to shut out Dads like this. You might not have even thought about the title in these terms since it is just an accepted norm in our society that Moms are the go to person in the family when it comes to parenting. But I find it hard to believe that not a single person sitting around the table at YouTube talking about this channel did not see the title as being exclusionary to Dads? I mean, YouTube must have at least one Dad on their staff working on this stuff who might have stood up and said, “hey, wait a sec – why not me?”

And while I am ranting, why do you need to refer to your new parenting channel as a “survival guide”. Yeah, parenting is hard work and I realize you are trying to be fun and playful, but to equate parenting with being in “survival” mode? C’mon, surely we can do better as parents than simply hunker down into “survival mode” for 20 odd (and yes, at times it is really odd) years.

Sigh. The battle continues….

If you are not familiar with the story, it is a dark, cautionary tale about environmental stewardship, corporations and consumer culture that resonates just as strong today (if not moreso) as it did when it was released in 1971. My daughter (who, at 5, seems to be exhibiting inherited signs of her Dad’s penchant for occasional dips into the melancholy pool) loves it, despite the rather bleak tone.

Apparently, a CGI big screen adaptation of the story is in the works and scheduled to be released in 2012. Until that arrives, this 25 minute animated special from 1972, voiced by Eddie Albert, works for my girl.

While it’s cute and all, I have to say I kinda like the other way :).

For the most part, the messages are positive, the role models are decent and the skank factor for the girls is not off the chart (you can read the review from Common Sense Media & get their take on the series). Even the mean girl is not all that mean, and most of the movies are good clean fun with lots of dancing & singing that I expected my ballet loving singing & dancing daughter would respond to. And she did.

What I didn’t expect was the way my son would react. He also loves them, not so much for the singing and dancing, but because of the sports. High School Musical has turned my son into a full fledged wannabe jock. You name it – basketball, baseball, golf, he wants to try it all, and I have spent a good deal of my summer in the backyard shooting Little Tikes hoops and tossing balls for him to whack at with his plastic bats. It has been a hoot to see him get so excited about sports, whatever the source of his inspiration.

There is one problem, however (hence the title of the post). Knowing his love of all things baseball recently, I decided to introduce him to the sport at the pro level, so we sat down to watch a game on TV. After watching for about 10 minutes, the little guy turned to me.

“Dad.”

“Yes.”

“When do they start dancing?”

Seems that in his HSM influenced world, this is how ball games go.

Let’s see Roy Halladay bust it like that!

Does your teenager have a cell phone? If they do, there is a good chance they are using it to cheat at school according to a new report by Common Sense Media.

Key findings from the report say that more than 1/3 of teens with cell phones admit to having used them to cheat at school, while over 1/2 of all teens admitted to using some form of cheating involving the Internet.

According to the report, we parents are living in denial. Not that this practice exists in schools - 76% of us believe that cell phone cheating is happening in school - but only 3% of us believe our kids are doing it.

Hmmmm, 35% of kids admit to doing it, but only 3% of their parents believe they are doing it. That is a big digital denial divide.

But really the question we as parents need to be asking is not whether our kids are cheating or not (although that is a very important question), but rather what is cheating? Perhaps it is time to take a long hard look at what we think cheating is in the digital age. If we do, then we might come to the conclusion that how we define cheating may actually be hurting our kids.

For example, is it cheating for students to collaborate with their peers to find the answer to problems? 1 in 4 of the students in the survey don’t think so and I tend to agree with them. After all, is this not what we “grownups” do in real life? When we need to figure out a problem, what do we do? We tap into our personal networks and fire up the web. Isn’t collaborating to figure out a solution to a problem something we want to foster in our kids?

And is it so wrong for students to use the most game changing educational tool called the Internet to find answers? I mean, why do we ask kids to  pretend that this massively useful tool does not exist? Why do we insist that they need to be able to work inside a bubble to solve problems?

What I do have a problem with is a student taking someone else’s work and turning it in as their own. That, to me, is my moral threshold. But collaborating with their peers using technology to solve problems? That is something we should be rewarding, not punishing.

I realize this may seem like an extreme position to take, and it is fraught with a whole can of worms that educators have to deal with (not the least of which is how do teachers really assess learning), but I think we need to take a long hard look at how we define cheating in a digital age. If we do then we might just discover that what we think of as cheating is actually an essential skill our kids are going to need to thrive in a digital world.

Photo: Poor Marc Has No Idea She CHEATS! by Mr_Stein used under Creative Commons license.

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• Potential in their Pockets: Should cell phones be allowed student planners? (coolcatteacher.blogspot.com)
• Cell phones and internet can be used to cheat. (teach42.com)
• Teen cheating morphs with new tech, poll shows (news.cnet.com)
• One Third of Teens Use Cellphones to Cheat in School (usnews.com)

Our usual morning routine when I drop her of at playschool is like this. After giving her a goodbye hug and kiss, I leave and walk down the front steps of the preschool. At the bottom I stop and turn around. The pre-school has a big bay window in the front of it overlooking the street and every morning there is my girl, standing in the window, smiling and waving goodbye to me.

I begin to walk down the street until I hear a tap at the window behind me. I turn around and there she is, still smiling and waving. I wave back. I go a few more steps down the street, stop and turn around. She is still standing in the window, watching me walk away. She smiles and waves. I smile and wave back. I go a few more steps, stop, turn and wave. She is still there and returns the wave.  We repeat our turn and wave 3 or 4 times as I walk down the street. Sometimes I turn around and she is making a silly face in the window. Sometimes, I do the same and we share a little giggle. It’s a private moment in a public place - a moment of connection and transition for both my daughter and myself and it continues until I am around the corner and out of sight of the daycare window.

We have done our window dance every daycare & preschool morning  for the past 2 1/2 years. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, after I walked down the steps of the preschool, I turned around to wave. She wasn’t at the window. I paused, waiting for her happy little face to appear in the window.  After a moment, still no girl in the window.  I waited a bit longer. Still no girl. Slowly it dawned on me that maybe she wasn’t coming to the window.

I began to walk slowly away from the preschool, stopping and turning every few steps and hoping I would see her face in the window waving at me. But each time was the same - no smiling girl waving goodbye to her dad. After 3 turns to look back, I finally did catch a glimpse of her through the big preschool bay window. She was laughing and running around with her friends, oblivious that her dad was standing on the street looking in, wishing that she would come to the window to wave goodbye.

She wasn’t coming.

I continued walking down the street, occasionally glancing back just in case she had taken up her usual spot and was waving and smiling at me walking away. But she never appeared, caught up in her own little world of friends and play inside the preschool. And I realized that each time I turned around and she wasn’t there, I felt a little bit sadder.

It seems like such a silly little thing to remember - the first time my girl didn’t come to the window to wave goodbye to me in our morning ritual. But for some reason, this little first moment has stuck with me. All day yesterday it kept replaying over and over in my head, implanting itself into some remote memory brain cells. I don’t know why. But it is a first moment that obviously has hit me at some level to make me want to wake up at 5 am and document it here for some future me to look back on and remember.

Maybe I read too much into this little moment. That somehow this is not some kind of sign that she is growing more independent and doesn’t require the comfort of her dad waving goodbye to her to signal that everything is okay and right in the world. More likely she probably just got caught up in her own little world.

But I am going to use this moment as a good reminder to stop and pay attention to those little everyday things and realize that when it comes to parenting, those little things are often just as important as those big milestones. It’s a realization that in the midst of the chaos that is our lives right now, I am experiencing just as many significant firsts as my kids. They may not be as developmentally big as taking a first step or uttering a first word, but they are big and significant in their own little way, even if the reasons why are not always obvious. And maybe they don’t have to be.

As tweenage Dora, our heroine has moved to the big city, attends middle school and has a whole new fashionable look.

Are you serious? One of the best role models on TV for young girls is heading down sassy Bratz route? A whole new “fashionable” look? Say it ain’t so!

The great thing about Dora is that she breaks so many stereotypes. She is a girl who goes on adventures in the wild, not in the mall. She has short hair, not long flowing locks. She wears shorts, not short skirts. She reads a map so we know she is into geography and science. All this is about to be reduced into yet another friggin trashy pop culture princess mess.

But you know what? It is going to backfire. We parents who love Dora love her for exactly those reasons. Dora IS the anti-Bratz and she will not survive this makeover. She can’t out-Bratz the Bratz. And parents will see through this crass attempt to cash in on trash. Dora is popular for precisely the opposite reasons that Mattel are trying to sell. And, as Packaging Girlhood points out,  we know who the real Dora is and will always be.

But we know the truth. If the original Dora grew up, she wouldn’t be a fashion icon or a shopaholic. She’d develop her map reading skills and imagine the places she could go. She’d capitalize on those problem solving skills to design new ways to bring fresh water to communities in need around the world. Maybe she’d become a world class runner or follow her love of animals and become a wildlife preservationist or biologist. We’ll never know because the only way a girl can grow up in tween town, is to narrow that symphony of choices to one note. It’s such a sell out of Dora, of all girls.

Voice your concern. Sign the online petition that has been started by the fine folks at Packaging Girlhood and send a message to Mattel that we don’t need Dora the Mall Explorer.

My wife won a contest last week through a local parenting magazine called Island Parent. As a prize my wife got to pick anything they had on their prize table. She and The Girl went down to the magazine office on Monday to claim their prize.

After scanning the assorted books, toys, tickets and related stuff on the prize table for a few minutes, The Girl’s eyes stopped and became fixed on something. My wife looked at the book The Girl was checking out. It was titled Got Tape?: Roll Out the Fun With Duct Tape!. How could she resist? Their first project? The pair of flip flops in the photo above. I sense a new suit is in the works for Father’s Day.

To balance out the negative social network vibe I may have been putting forth lately, here is a positive story from Ed. Magazine, published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education about how teens are harnessing the power of their social networks to learn.

Thanks for the Add. Now Help Me with My Homework focuses on research done by Christine Greenhow (University of Minnesota). Greenhow examined how teens use social networks and discovered that they are using sites like MySpace and Facebook in positive ways.

Greenhow interviewed 1,200 students in 13 high schools in Minneapolis-St.Paul, which she followed up with some more indepth interviews. The results showed that students are increasingly using their social network to connect, collaborate, share and learn. These students are developing skills they will need in the future.

The kind of skills students are developing on social networking sites, says Greenhow, are the very same 21st century skills that educators have identified as important for the next generation of knowledge workers — empathy, appreciation for diversity of viewpoints, and an ability to multitask and collaborate with peers on complex projects.

The story of Theresa Sommers, a high school student, is one that might seem exceptional, but is becoming more common.

The more she used the online social networking site (SNS), however, the more bored she became with merely being popular; she started using her time for more heartfelt conversations with friends and delved more deeply into her personal interests. A budding photographer, she posted her best shots to the site and searched forums of professional photographers for encouragement and advice. She began, as well, to seek out students at colleges she was interested in attending, even opening up a new account on Facebook, a site more heavily used by college students, to network.

Theresa is leveraging the power of her social network to achieve her educational goals. What better way to research a potential college or university than to connect directly with students who are already going there and taking subjects she is interested in?

And she even began to post some of her creative writing and would solicit advice on homework essays from her circle of friends, asking them “How long did you take on your essay?” or “How’d you write it?” Often she’d post her homework online. “Everybody does it,” she says.

Outside interests aren’t the only topics that found their way to student homepages and Sommers wasn’t the only student to regularly compare notes on school assignments. “If I am stuck on a project, I might send a chat message to a friend, and he might provide an answer or say, ‘Take a deep breath; you can do this,’” says Greenhow, summing up what students often say.

Now the thought that she is posting her homework online is one that I am sure is making most traditional educator quake in their boots. But I think sharing is a good thing, and something I hope Theresa continues to do. Human civilization is built upon sharing knowledge. Theresa is doing this, and learning this, at the micro level.

The research also took a look at cyber bullying and found that most students behaviour is exactly opposite of the cyber bully stereotype.

Far from media stories about cyber bullying, meanwhile, she found that most students use the medium to reach out to their peers for emotional support and as a way to develop self-esteem.

And what about the danger of blowing a job with a future employer because someone posted a photo of you passed out in a bathroom at your college kegger? Well, the reverse is true as well as employers increasingly use social network sites to find employees as well.

In fact, despite cautionary tales of employers trolling social networking sites to find inappropriate Halloween pictures or drug slang laced in discussion forums, many employers are increasingly using these sites as a way to find talent. A survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers cited this spring in The New York Times found that more than half of employers now use SNSs to network with job candidates. The website CareerBuilder.com even added an application to allow employers to search Facebook for candidates. “Savvy users say the sites can be effective tools for promoting one’s job skills and all-around business networking,” says the Times.

When I read studies like this, I can’t help but feel that schools and libraries that ban social networks outright are not only missing the boat, but sending a message to students that these sites are somehow bad or dangerous and not powerful tools that, when used correctly, can open up a rich and rewarding world to them. If we want our kids to be able to become responsible digital citizens, then we have to play a role in helping them learn how to do that. Banning Facebook and MySpace is not the way to do that.

Photo credit: Stopped by Mishawaka Penn Harris Public Library to see for Myself by mstephen7. Used under Creative Commons license.

On March 8th that semi-annual tradition of changing the clocks and royal screwing up our kids sleep patterns returns once again.

I will not be kicked in the ass by the time police this time around. I will not suffer endless struggles and fights with my kids to get them to bed at 8pm when their biological clock says it is only 7.

I will not put up with 2 weeks of hell as sleep deprived maniacs wreck vengeance on our sacred Mommy-Daddy evening time.

No, this year, we are being proactive and we have begun the transition.

We’re lucky. At 5 and 2 they don’t know how to tell time yet. And we are taking full advantage. Each night, bath begins a few minutes earlier than the night before. Sure, on March 7th they will go to bed at 7 o’clock, but on March 8th when we jump ahead one hour and 7 o’clock becomes 8, it should be seamless for our kids circadian clocks.

Well, that’s the theory anyway. Here’s hoping. In parent life, as you know all too well, things rarely work out as you plan. But we’re still going to give it a shot. If it works, wonderful. If not, well then,  there is always November 1st, when the insanity begins anew.

Flickr Image: Robot Clock by Jek in the Box under Creative Commons license.

To vaccinate or not is a hot button issue with new parents these days, thanks in no small part to one 1998 article published by the British medical journal The Lancet.

The article in question was written by Andrew Wakefild, which made the claim that there might be a connection between the MMR  (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism. Many see this controversial report as the beginning of the current anti-vax movement.

This month, 2 new pieces of information have been added to the debate that might influence the immunization decision for parents.

On February 13th, a special federal court in the U.S. ruled that vaccines do not cause autism. The case is significant for 2 reasons. For one, there were three separate cases involved in this ruling, each with their own judges acting independently of each other. And in all three cases, the rulings were similar in that all three judges found no evidence that the vaccines caused the children’s disorders. That’s three judges independently supporting each other with similar decisions.

In each of the cases, the plaintiffs did not have to prove their case with scientific certainty. They they only had to show that there was a preponderance of evidence or, as the article puts it,  “50 percent and a hair”. All three cases failed to do that.

Meanwhile, a related story from the Sunday Times earlier this month reexamines that original 1998 research by Andrew Wakefield, with disturbing allegations that Wakefield manipulated data and misreported his results to add weight to his claim that there is a link between MMR and autism.

In evidence presented to the GMC (General Medical Council), however, there has emerged potential explanations of how Wakefield was able to obtain the results he did. This evidence, combined with unprecedented access to medical records, a mass of confidential documents and cooperation from parents during an investigation by this newspaper, has shown the selective reporting and changes to findings that allowed a link between MMR and autism to be asserted.

The article also goes on to say that since Wakefield’s results were originally published in 1998, no other researcher has been able to reproduce the findings.

Some used statistics to see if autism took off in 1988, when MMR was introduced. It did not. Others used virology to see if MMR caused bowel disease, a core suggestion in the paper. It did not. Yet more replicated the exact Wakefield tests. They showed nothing like what he said.

As a result of the 1998 report, parents in Britain immediatly began questioning whether or not they should vaccinate their children for MMR. As a result, immunization rates in Britain fell from 92% to 80% and measles in Britain is now “endemic”. In 1998, there were only 56 cases of measles reported. Last year there were 1,348. Since 2007, cases of the measles has increased by 36% in Britain. 2 children have died from measles, a disease that had not taken a British life in 14 years.

There is no doubt that immunization is a controversial topic. There are dozens of websites dedicated to both sides of the issue, some vitriolic to the point of rage, others more reasoned and sensible. As a parent, immunization is just one of those areas where you have to do a bit of research and make a decision that sits right with you and your beliefs.

Flickr Photo credit: The children who will die this year from diseases for which there is a vaccine by grewlike. Used under Creative Commons license.

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• Original Link Between MMR and Autism Based on False Data (ecochildsplay.com)
• Anti-Vaccination Scientist Accused Of Manipulating Data (dailykos.com)
• Court sides with science, says no vaccine-autism link (arstechnica.com)

Not to be the wet blanket at the party, but this does raise a troublesome point for me that I seem to be riffing on lately, which is the responsibility we, as parents, have in protecting our kids digital identity.

Set aside the issue of what will David think 20 years from now about this video - and, who knows, maybe this will go down as being one of the greatest things that happens in his life - but let’s take a look at how David is being exploited.

Right now, David’s video is being remixed, mashed and reconfigured by hundreds of people. The vast majority of them benign, respectful and doing it for the love of recontextualizing something old into something new. But there are a lot of people who are making money off David.

Already the remixes are showing up, and getting significant traffic. Many of these remixes have Google Ad overlays and embedded links to other sites as people try to cash in on David’s 15 minutes of fame. In some instances, the video has been downloaded and uploaded to another users account in hopes of driving traffic to that persons website or product. David has become a commercial, and right now there is a feeding frenzy at this Warholian trough.

I’m not casting any stones here at David’s parents. I’m pretty sure David’s Dad had no idea this thing would go viral when he posted it on YouTube. Instead, I think the people who are exploiting this kid to make money are the real problem here.

Not that this would fix it entirely, but one strategy that would help mitigate the risk of commercial exploitation of future David’s is to post your videos on a video sharing site that allows you to add some kind of copyright protection to the video. For example, blip.tv (and others) allow you to attach a Creative Commons license to your videos that would at least give parents some recourse for legal action. YouTube has no such copyright mechanism.

If you do want to use YouTube but want to reduce the risk of your video going wild, then check out the private sharing options that allow you to share your video privately with up to 25 people.

If you have been reading my posts lately it might seem that I am down on social networks. In fact, I am not. I think that as a society we are better off with social networks and the concept of being open and transparent. But when we use these tools with our kids, we have to temper our desire to share our kids most private and intimate moments with the responsibility we have to respect their privacy and, in this case, protect them from being commercially exploited.