iPhone App Claims to Know What Crying Baby Wants

You may have noticed that some parents seem more in tune to their iPhones than their babies. For those parents, there’s now an app to translate your baby’s cries. Is that kid hungry? Wet? Mad that mom is ignoring her to play yet another round of Freecell on her phone? This app can tell you what you baby really wants.

Or so the promo text goes. The Cry Translator was developed in Spain. It’s creator, Biloop Technologies, claims it is based on extensive “clinical trials”. They also claim it is extremely accurate.

The app purportedly can distinguish between five basic infant cries: hungry, tired, bored, annoyed or stressed. They say Unless one of those is a code word for, “Hey! There’s poop in my pants!” these folks are missing one of the big culprits on, “Stuff That Makes Babies Cry.” Continue reading »

Best of FameCrawler - Week of November 13th

Kate Hudson Says Smoking Took Her Away From Family

Cindy Crawford & Husband Victims of a Extortion Scam

Rosie O’Donnell Is A “Monster” To Live With, Says Insider

Isla Fisher, Sacha Baron Cohen And Olive Spotted (Photos)

Rebecca Gayheart Finally Confirms Pregnancy

Celebrity Guess Who - Kid(s) Edition

Great Dad Moments - The Edge

LL COOL J Gives Chris O’Donnell Parenting Advice

Demi Moore Prefers To Be Called A Puma

Shaq And Shaunie Are Headed For Divorce Court

Baby Talk With Kourtney Kardashian & Kendra Wilkinson

Steven Tyler Quits Aerosmith

Sure, Kid, We Can Talk About Anything. Except Math.

When my daughter informed she would be not be homeschooling after all, one of the many little sighs of relief I exhaled was that I wouldn’t have to teach her algebra, or even addition.

As a bright kid, I was always “gifted” at math, but that didn’t mean I liked it. By the time I hit high school, I’d gotten the message that being good with numbers wasn’t cool for a girl, so I shirked it. When it came time to go to college, I chose a school that did not require any math classes.

Now my stepson is 15, and I can’t even read his math homework, let alone help him solve it.

Happily, I saved my kids from a lifetime of math cluelessness by marrying a professional nerd who teaches math and physics at a university. In our house, he is the math department.

When Lisa Belkin broached this topic over on Motherlode, commenters pointed out the gender disparity between men and women around math. Lisa’s family, like mine, is headed by a math averse mom and a math friendly dad.

I’m trying to do more math for the girls’ sake. I want my girls to grow up knowing women can do just as much math as men. But let’s be real: I can pull this off now because the oldest one is 5. She is hard at work learning to count to 100. When she starts bringing home differential equations, she is going straight to Daddy.

Two recent studies show that most American parents are a lot like me when it comes to math homework: clueless and uncomfortable. One commissioned by Intel shows that parents feel more equipped to talk about sex and drugs with their kids than math and science. Another, by Sylvan Learning, found that more than 6 out of 10 parents are not confident that they can solve their kids’ math homework in middle and high school.

Those jitters about math homework translate to kids, who start to feel nervous about the subject themselves. Math is increasingly important for higher education and professional fields, but most adults rate it as the most challenging subject taught in school.

For good reason. Less than 40% of eight and fourth graders are “proficient” or better at grade-level math skills. Clearly our kids could use some help with their math homework.

Do you help your kids with their homework? Does the thought of having to go through high school algebra again give you the shivers? If we can’t help our kids learn math, who can?

Photo: tracy_the_astonishing

Best of FameCrawler - Week of November 6th

Angelina Jolie Has A New Leading Man

Angelina Jolie Shows Off Post Twin Body In Salt (PHOTOS)

Does Tom Make Suri Talk To Bottles and Door Knobs?

Nicole Kidman - Why Did You Burn The Tom Diaries?

A-Rod and Kate Make a Home Run

Celebrity Guess Who - Mom Edition

Katie Holmes Chose Religion Over Friends?

Did Chris Martin Cheat On Gwyneth Paltrow During A U2 Concert?

Jon Ignores Rabbi’s Advice, Goes Straight To Hell

It’s a Chalke Boy!

DJ Lance Rock on Brad Pitt’s Halloween Costume

Kate Gosselin Trick-Or-Treats Without Cameras

Mommy, Can I Make a Facebook Profile? Please!?!?

Mom and Dad delight in rediscovering old chums.  High-schooler James uses it to make plans, publish goofy photos and check out the hotties who are friends of friends.  But now 10-year-old Abigail wants her own Facebook page.  Should you let her?

Both Facebook and MySpace require users to be thirteen, but…come on.  Site administrators may not know that a portion of their users still have American Girl dolls languishing on their beds and, even if they care, will likely not find out.  Is this a bad thing? Opinions from experts fall all over the map, as CNN found out when it recently raised the question.

Continue reading »

Keeping Your Kid Safe Online

The cyberworld is chock-full of scary things.  Social networking sites enable our kids to meet people that they never would in the real world–people you’d prefer they not encounter at this age–or ever.  Cyberbullying?  Happens every day.  And sexting?  Yup, it’s a fact of life.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the internet comes with risks.  Of course parents need to be aware of all of the internet bogeymen out there.  Just as importantly, they need to talk to their kids about the ways they communicate and socialize online.  The FTC wants to help with Net Cetera:  Chatting With Kids About Being Online, a useful go-to guide for parents.

Continue reading »

Should You Tell Your Kid You Were Canned?

So you figured that it would happen at one point in your life and it finally did.  You’ve been fired.  Pink-slipped.  Handed your walking papers.  Now what on earth do you tell the kids?

My initial gut would have been to sugarcoat it…spin a fairy tale worthy of Walt Disney himself.  But then I read a piece in the Huffington Post by Mika Brzezinski’s, co-anchor of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.   A few years before landing the cable gig,  Brzezinski was a hot shot at CBS News:  anchor of the weekend newscast and correspondent for 60 Minutes Wednesday.  A network shakeup sent her to the unemployment line, clutching a severance package and a bruised ego.

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They Say: Maybe a Little Screen Time is Not So Bad

It seems that the recent refund offer by Disney was the spark that reignited the flame of a decades-old controversy:   Is television harmful to tots?   Are we a society of lazy, selfish parents that use the screen as a live-in babysitter?  And if so, are we creating a society of mush-brained mutants that call the remote “Daddy”?

Julia Pimsleur Levine, mother of 2 and creator of Little Pim, an educational foreign-language DVD series for the toddler set, has weighed in with the following letter:

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Best of FameCrawler - Week of October 23rd

Woody Allen and Mia Farrow’s Son is a “Friggin’ Genius”

Real Housewife of New Jersey to Lose Her Dream Home

Gilles Marini - Dancing Dad Poses for Playboy (PHOTOS)

Marge Simpson’s Playboy Photos Scandal!

Nicole Richie Wants A Prenup

Special Agent Booth Cheated On Pregnant Wife!?

Matt Damon And Luciana - Hot Stuff

Brad and Angelina Checking Out Orphanages?

College Tuition Growing as Fast as Your Kid

It seems that higher education may be the only business that’s currently recession-proof.  According to a survey released by the College Board, tuition at 4-year private colleges spiked 4.4% this year to over $26,000.  Students at public institutions got an even bigger hit:  up 6% for both in-state and out-of state students, to over $7,000 and $18,000 respectively.

Continue reading »