Archive for September, 2009

Why are so many kids’ movies so scary? Forget about Disney until your child is at least five or extremely stoic. Even Pixar’s gentler flicks are filled with horrors: mother fish who swim away and never come back (Finding Nemo), scary neighbors who like to make hideous creatures from toys (Toy Story). Watching a movie’s no fun if it results in nightmares for days afterwards.

The Scholastic Storybook Treasures collection is much sweeter stuff. These animated and live-action versions of classic tales are a thrill for kids whose parents have read them the book versions of tales like Strega Nona, Where the Wild Things Are, and Good Night, Gorilla. The stories are gentle enough for toddlers, but lively enough for preschoolers, and even grade schoolers. They come in many collections: James Marshall fairytales, scary stories for Halloween, stories about trains, buses, and cars. But once you get hooked on them, you’re going to want to shell out for the big kahuna: 100 stories collected into 16 oh-so-worth-it DVDs, or 881 glorious minutes when you can allow your child to watch something without having your finger hovering over the fast-forward button on your DVD player.

Scholastic Treasury of 100 Storybook Classics (Scholastic Video Collection), $89.99

It’s pretty easy to find mommy-and-me clothing, particularly if you’re into dressing like one of Santa’s helpers or some kind of gingham prairie girl. Daddy/kid matching clothing is a heck of a lot rarer; probably because Daddy won’t put up with looking like a giant tool.

Footsteps Clothing, however, a manufacturer with a specialty in kid-and-parent clothing, makes an excellent line of T-shirts in kid, infant, and adult sizes. Cutest of all: the Lucky Dad/Lucky Kid shirts, plain T’s in mod colors, emblazoned with the legend “Lucky Dad” or “Lucky Kid.” Here is a Father’s Day or birthday gift that won’t molder in the back of the shirt drawer.

Lucky Dad/Lucky Kid T-shirts, $10-24

At what age should a child be able to remove his glass eye and use the socket as a bottle-opener? When is it appropriate to plunder the neighbors, after or before family dinner? How can one turn an unassuming minivan into a pirate schooner? All these questions and more are answered in this complete Guide to Pirate Parenting, probably the only parenting guide you’ll ever read that neither has an opinion on sleep training nor time-outs.

There is advice both out-there (how to remove an octopus from your child’s hair) and strangely sensible: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to be a pirate, and he’ll steal other people’s fish for a lifetime.” There are pirate-themed nursery rhymes, checklists to chart your pirate’s developmental progress, and even suggestions for pirate-compliant discipline methods, such as smacking your teen in the head with an oar. Somehow this seems like a much more appropriate bridal-shower gift than one of Dr. Sears’ enormous tomes.

Guide to Pirate Parenting, $11.99

Frenemy. Bromance. BFF. These days we have lots of ways to label friends and friendships. Heck, thanks to Facebook, the words “friend” and “de-friend” are now verbs. The lingo might be changing but the basic concept stays the same: Friends are important in our lives. And laying a solid friendship foundation for young kids is key for their social development as they get older.

London parenting expert Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, author of Raising Confident Girls and Raising Confident Boys, is out with a new book entitled Making Friends: A Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Child’s Friendships. She offers tips for parents on teaching kids to be good friends without micromanaging those relationships:

Leading by example - For the first three or four years, so much of a child’s learning is about watching and copying. So parents have to teach by example. “You can teach good friendship patterns if you socialize with friends regularly and are warm, generous and relaxed with them.” Let your kids see you laugh with your own BFFs.

Mom in the spotlight - Research into why some kids have happy friendships while others struggle “shows the biggest influence is having a mom who has warm friendships.” So keep your own friendship networks alive when your kids are small no matter how high-maintenance they are. The second biggest factor linked to happy friendships is a good bond between mother and child.

Positive reinforcement - Like all those ads in New York City’s subway stations state, if you see something, say something. “The best way to encourage the traits of good friendship is to say something positive when you see your child” help a friend, share or engage is some other act of kindness.

Showing restraint - With helicopter parenting all too prevalent these days, it’s important to realize that too much parental interference in the friendship process “can not only undermine your child’s long-term skill development and confidence but also suggest to him that you don’t trust him.” Kids need to learn to trust their own judgment. That happens when they are left to their own devices to learn about human nature, their own preferences and the “skills needed to maintain friendships.”

The cousin factor: Many children are friends with their cousins. But after about age six or seven, it’s essential that kids also have friends outside the family circle. Friendships with cousins can be too “easy” and “protected” and don’t necessarily expose kids to some of the “rougher aspects of friendship.”

Making Friends is available on amazon.com.

Since the economy began heading south, we’ve become accustomed to hearing about people making drastic career changes in order to follow lifelong passions- bankers becoming bakers or yoga instructors. You get the idea. Designer Anne MacGilvray was ahead of the curve.

She sang with the Lyric Opera of Chicago, took a job at a cognitive psychology research lab and added the title “mom” along the way. And then about a year before the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing global economic meltdown, the multi-talented MacGilvray started thinking about creating an eco-friendly line of children’s clothing. Lucky us. Her Adooka collection is something to sing about. It’s clean and modern but also has a timeless quality to it. The “Eyes in the Dark” sleeper is a simple blue number with eyes on the behind and left side of the chest where a pocket usually sits. Check out the equally adorable Eyes in the Dark sleep sack for infants.

Then there’s a cream dress with a clematis vine and red bloom. A clever pop of color without being overpowering. These streamlined aesthetics are apparent in all of the brand’s layette and toddler pieces. Adooka is made from certified organic cotton fabric and low-impact, fiber-reactive dyes free of heavy metals and toxins. The snaps are nickel-free. MacGilvray also pays close attention to construction details that make life with a squirming baby easier: no back snaps or endless rows of snaps/buttons to be lined up at 3am changing time.

That alone is worthy of an encore performance.

For a list of stores and to shop online, visit adooka.com.

For every woman who squirmed her way through the anti-feminist messages in Disney’s The Little Mermaid, Ponyo is sweet relief. Based loosely on the same Hans Christian Andersen tale, Ponyo is a goldfish princess whose fierce determination to be with the human Sosuke causes a tsunami. Ponyo must then restore the balance between humankind and nature, saving Sosuke’s small fishing village.

The girl-power themes are many: Ponyo herself is a strong female character, while her mother the ocean queen is both powerful and kind. Most important of all, Ponyo is the center of the story, making a hero’s journey and not just fighting for her man.

Helmed by Hayao Miyazaki, this film is aimed at a younger audience than his Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. Kids as young as five will be able to appreciate the gentle fable, and the violence is subdued enough that all but the most sensitive won’t be frightened.

Ponyo is in theaters nationwide.

Everyone loves Blabla Kids’ line of soft hand-knit stuffed animals (the colorful sock monkeys in striped shorts are particularly popular) and now the company has branched out into baby dolls. Like the sock monkeys, Blabla’s baby dolls have soft and squishy bodies, stitched-on yarn hair, and embroidered features (no buttons for babies to choke on!). They are produced by the same Peruvian artists that Blabla employs to make the stuffed animals, so you needn’t fear supporting some sweatshop somewhere.

Blabla even makes a line of high-quality cotton clothing to fit the dollies; the simple pieces are made with muted colors and easy shapes that approximate a modern kids’ wardrobe much better than the typical Barbiefied clothing palette of shocking pink, bright pink, and eye-searing pink. Oh, and Blabla’s choice to make several dolls with brown skin makes us happy, too.

Blabla Classic Doll Babies, $44, blablakids.com.

A Swedish research study which looked at 13,376 women born between 1952 and 1989 has found that the more educated a girl’s family is, the more likely she is to develop an eating disorder.

The study, reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology’s September 1 issue, tracked hospitalization for eating disorders with the level of education of her forebears, as well as the girl’s own performance at school. Researchers found that girls whose parents attended college were about twice as likely to be treated for an eating disorder. Girls whose maternal grandmothers had a college education were six times as likely. And girls with the highest grades at age 15 had double the risk of developing an eating disorder when compared to the group of girls with the lowest grades.

What does all this mean? Lead researcher Jennie Ahren-Moonga speculates that high-performing families create pressure to succeed and conform; this might play into the obsessiveness that fuels many eating disorders. In addition, girls who grew up in a competitive environment and succeed (as evidenced by higher grades) may themselves have qualities such as drive and perfectionism, that are often twinned with dysfunctional eating.

Your typical mom/daughter matching outfit falls on the continuum somewhere between cutesy and creepy. Either you look like you should have on Holly Hobbie bonnet, or like you’re walking around with your very own voodoo doll. But the sharp, stylish mommy-and-me knits in Inca Textiles’ Maya Luna line won’t make you feel like a fool.

Designer Carmela Pinillos de Brouwer finds inspiration from her homeland, Peru, known for its sumptuous weaving and hand-knitting techniques. Each of her sweaters is hand-loomed in Peru, and many are made of native Alpaca wool.

The Mila mommy & me comes in two versions: small through XL for the ladies, child’s sizes 1 to 4. Knit from a tasty cotton/acrylic blend, the sage green softness will make you and your girl look sharp all the way through fall. Just remember: “Put your sweater on” is a much easier sell when Mom’s wearing the same one.

Mila sweater, $112/$59

We’re getting a powerful tool in our efforts to mold kids into rocket scientists, microbiologists and nuclear physicists: a new CD from They Might Be Giants.

Alternative rock heavyweights John Flansburgh and John Linnell are releasing their new children’s album, “Here Comes Science,” on the heels of their Grammy-Award-winning “Here Come the 123s.” The dynamic duo from Brooklyn tackle hard core science subjects like no other rock stars could. Not only do they deal with planets and the body’s circulation system but also photosynthesis and computer-assisted design. To ensure their material was accurate, TMBG called on Eric Siegel, the director and chief content officer at the New York Hall of Science, to serve as a consultant. The album’s standout iPod-worthy song is “Meet the Elements.” Bet you never thought you’d want to get up and dance to a song about the periodic table. Also particularly ear-worthy are “I am a Paleontologist,” “How Many Planets?” “Speed and Velocity” and “Science is Real.” The CD comes with a full-length animated DVD of engaging and artistic videos. Here Comes Science is geared toward post-toddlers but there’s certainly enough to keep the sippy-cup set entertained while learning a thing or two.

Not sure whether to give these guys another Grammy, a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences, or both.

Available on amazon.com.