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Strollerderby
Once Upon a Time
The new TV shows Once Upon a Time and Grimm have something very significant in common. Both of these shows feature Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, and a slew of other iconic characters from historic fairy tales from the likes of Brothers Grimm. What’s so odd is that not just that these two shows not just use fairy tales as their inspiration, not that they are debuting less than a week apart, but that both of these shows that highlight these characters that kids love are actually more for adults. But why? Continue reading »
Everyone knows screen time for little ones is a big no-no. Right? Attention problems, behavior issues, epic battles with their siblings over the remote: the problems TV can cause for kids are legion. The AAP has just issued new media guidelines for parents stressing that not only should young kids watch no TV at all, you shouldn’t watch TV yourself when your kids are around.
What if all this stress about screen time for kids is just so much fearmongering? Do screens really hurt the kids who watch them? One Slate writer is questioning the research. He says his 1-year-old son loves screen time, and letting him have it makes their lives better.
It’s a common parental fear that their children will be exposed to the sexual kaleidoscope of horrors that can be found all too easily on the internet, but research presented yesterday at the American Psychological Association’s annual meeting shows that the internet only accounts for 16% to 25% of exposure to sexual content by children ages 10-15.
While this may easy your fears about the internet, it leaves a seemingly innocuous (and much more insidious) presence as the main provider of sexual content to our kids.
My parents divorced when I was 5-years-old. At 8, my big brother took it the hardest. It affected him the most, obviously. My other two brothers were just babies and had no idea what was going on.
After the divorce our mom, who was previously a stay-at-home-mom, got a full-time job at a center for the developmentally challenged, and dad skipped town. Consequently, we didn’t see him much. We did see a lot of TV though and I think, in a way, it saved us. We had no idea what a dad was supposed to be like. Our dad was the voice on the phone that constantly grilled us about that “latest A-hole your mother is dating”.
Cliff Huxtable would never do that. Cliff was patient and kind, calm and understanding. He could fix anything, in 30 minutes, no less! He didn’t even leave the house to go to work, for crying out loud. He just went to his office downstairs and occasionally delivered babies.
These sitcoms were comforting to a couple of kids who spent a lot of their childhood home alone. And I suspect dads like Steven Keaton from Family Ties and Cliff Huxtable taught my brother a lot more about being a dad than our dad ever did.
So, exactly who do Americans consider the top TV dads of all-time? In order of the votes they received, last to first, these are the results of the latest Harris Poll of more than 2,000 adults asked which TV dad they most wanted to be theirs. Do you agree with their picks? Who’s missing? Who would you drop?
CLICK TO SEE THE TOP 15 TV DADS
Narrowing their blood vessels one cartoon at a time?
One of my main sources of mothering guilt is how much time my daughter spends watching television.
Mama needs a shower? Go watch Dora, sweetheart. Toddler tantrum time? Come sit here with mama and we’ll watch Bubble Guppies.
I don’t pop pills, I don’t drink during the day, it’s the TV that is my motherhood crutch. Continue reading »
They deal drugs. They mock their kids. They lose their cool. Today’s TV Moms are a far cry from the idealized television moms of yesteryear.
These days, moms on the small screen are more likely to put their own needs first and — unlike earlier generations of TV moms — they don’t always seem to know what they’re doing. Continue reading »
We’ve all seen the television commercials. A gorgeous model struts down the sidewalk in slow motion, showing off the latest fashion. Heads turn, until finally the model stops in front of a mirror and coos in a generic European accent, “I poo in blue.”
Okay, maybe you haven’t seen that commercial, in which the model, a two-year-old boy, is shilling the new denim diaper by Huggies. The 30-second spot ends with the visual tagline, “The coolest you’ll look pooping your pants.” Or, it does on some networks, anyway. The New York Times reports that ABC, ABC Family and Sprout “objected to screen text at the end of the spot that included the word ‘pooping,’ (so) for those networks, the text was changed to, ‘When you gotta go, go in style.’”
It seems odd to me that those networks, which air programming geared specifically toward families with children in diapers, would get uppity about a reference to poop. What’s even more bothersome, though, is that according to Newsweek, ABC flat-out refused to air a commercial for Lane Bryant featuring a plus-sized model showing “too much cleavage.” With so many female-centric shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Cougar Town and The View, do they just not understand that plus-sized moms are their demographic? Or maybe they just can’t comprehend the idea that a woman might be proud of her body, whatever its size, and willing to laugh at the bodily functions of her child. My guess is networks are afraid that if we’re okay with ourselves and our bodily functions, we might stop buying the stuff that hides all of that raw humanity. Continue reading »
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Wendy Michaels 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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