Parenting Lingo Gets the Oxford Stamp of Approval

Whenever you’re in a specialized subculture, it can feel like the most useful of words take an absurdly long time to reach the pages of the dictionary. And as we all know, parenting is a specialized subculture.

But we’re getting there: Continue reading »

How Does $9.1 Billion in Savings Sound?

That’s what an economist for the Big Push for Midwives has calculated (pdf file) the country could save in healthcare expenditures if we increased the number of midwife-attended out-of-hospital births from 1 percent to 10 percent.

As Jennifer Block points out on RH Reality Check, hopsital maternity care accounts for the largest chunk of hospital expenses—a whole lot of which is paid for by the taxpayers. And where else are you going to get that kind of cost savings and improved results—fewer preterm births, fewer unnecessary interventions, etc.? Continue reading »

Are Children’s Book Authors All Vegetarians?

Perhaps it’s just our tendency to anthropomorphize every animal we draw in a picture book. Or perhaps the theory that early humans really evolved as prey species more than predators holds water and we have some innate loyalty for the home team despite our actual omnivorous ways.

But I’ve got to say that the number of stories in which a carnivorous animal that is just filling its ecological niche is made into a evil (or somehow, even worse, greedy) villain of the story is starting to bug me.

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Birth on YouTube

The winners of the Birth Matters Virginia competition for short videos on “Evidence Based Maternity Care” have been announced. They got 40 entries, which is impressive, I think, given the amount of work that goes into making something like this. And it means 40 more videos about birth and maternity care on YouTube, which is no bad thing, though I was told when I went to watch the winner than it had been “flagged” by users, which may limits its views. (Or might increase them. Who knows.)

I watched the top three:

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Survey Time: What Happened to Your Sex Life After Kids?

Feminist editor/writer/researchers Jennifer Baumgartner and Amy Richards want to know if/how your sex life changed after you had kids, and they’ve made a short little anonymous survey to ask you about it. But they left out a few key questions.

They say they modeled the questions after Betty Friedan’s 1957 survey of Smith college alumni that became The Feminine Mystique, which I take to mean that they’re hoping this will generate book-worthy material. Combining two such hotly debated topics as parenting and sex ought to generate something interesting, and being a bit of a survey junkie, I happily filled it out.

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Kids Forbidden to Bike or Walk to School

Here’s a rich one for our desperate-to-get-the-kids-more-exercise society: In the upstate New York town of Saratoga Springs, children at some schools aren’t allowed to bike or walk to school. In fact, when one student rode to school, with his mother, on a bike path, his bike was confiscated (the rule had never been publicized).

The principal goes on at some length rationalizing the rule. Mostly he’s scared of traffic and stranger abductions. Continue reading »

Raising a Child While Being a Revolutionary

If debates about whether to take your child to a political protest seem laughable to you (of course they’re going!), then you might want to head over to Michelle Foy’s interview with several left activists about their experiences raising children and staying active in various labor/political/justice struggles. Continue reading »

Hans Christian Andersen Award Nominees: Heard of Any of These?

You are surely familiar with Eric Carle, the American illusrator nominee to the International Board on Books for Young People’s 2010 Hans Christian Andersen awards for lifetime contribution to children’s literature. But how about the rest of the list?

There’s an author and illustrator each from 33 countries with overall winners to be announced next March. I’m sure winning is prestigious, but it seems like the list of nominees is far more valuable—though possibly just a total tease. A quick Amazon peruse showed that some of them have one or two works available in English, but others have none. Anyone got recommendations?

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Is Antichrist Anti Mother?

Lars von Trier’s gothic horror film Antichrist sounds, to put it put it mildly, like a miserable story—a couple trying, and utterly failing, to get over the accidental death of their young son descend into mutilating each other and themselves. And that’s the delicate description.

But how to interpret that story has got some critics in a debate over motherhood, sex, guilt, and misogyny.

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Joking About Shaken Babies: Too Much?

I’ll admit that when I saw the Onoin News Network video for the “BabySafe Ball” (”New BabySafe Ball Makes Shaking Your Infant Guilt and Injury Free!”) I wasn’t sure it was funny. I’m still not.

It felt like it wanted to be, in good old outrageous, offensive Onion style, but I think the problem was it didn’t have a good target to make fun of. Caregivers who get to the point of wanting to shake their babies? That’s all of us at some point. Not much of a point to make. People who actually do? Not so funny. Over-the-top baby safety devices? It’s an area ripe for satire, but this doesn’t quite hit home—usually those are protecting kids from something not all that likely or dangerous, not encouraging you to do something awful by making it supposedly safe.

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