Photo by guenterleitenbauer

How many times has my nine-year-old son said to me, “Daddy, for my birthday, can I please have a curling stone?”

Actually, none. 

The Olympics are, nevertheless, inspirational, particularly to kids who watch sports on TV and fantasize about how great they would be.  While you’re watching the Olympics, and a U.S. athlete or team wins a gold medal, you may be tempted to cheer and think or say out loud, “We won!”

If you do, remember something.

We didn’t win.  They won.  You watched.  Probably while sitting on the couch, eating something.

That’s not going to help your kid get to the Olympics, because watching TV makes you the opposite of athletic — it makes you fat.

How?

For one thing, it lowers your metabolism.  It’s supposed to work like this — your hypothalamus, a little blob of brain located right between and behind your eyes, regulates your body temperature, your need for sleep, and your appetite.  When your hypothalamus senses that your blood sugars are low, it sends signals that make you hungry, so you eat, and your blood sugars rise, until at a certain point, your gastrointestinal tract releases hormones, including cholesystokinin and secretin, which convey a return signal which the brain recognizes as satiety, and then you’re supposed to stop eating.  The problem is that those return cues can be subtle.  It’s not like you hear a siren or the lights start flashing.

“Television may induce us to eat more by causing our brain to monitor external non-food cues, the television screen,” says Dr Aric Sigman, of the British Psychological Society, “as opposed to internal food cues telling us that we have stuffed ourselves and can stop eating.”

So you eat five cookies instead of four, or seventy potato chips instead of fifty. 

It adds up. 

People under emotional stress are also prone to ignoring satiety signals.  They may turn to comfort foods that have a lot of fat or sugar or both and are high in calories.  Watching an exciting sporting event can bring on a kind of emotional stress you might think is harmless — that can make you fat too.

There are two other rather obvious factors to consider. One is that as you watch television, you’re bombarded with food ads, designed by people much smarter than you to make you buy food you probably wouldn’t buy if you gave it any thought.  I saw a commercial for Twinkies on TV once and had to go to the store immediately and buy some.  Why else would anybody ever buy Twinkies, if TV commercials hadn’t planted in our brains the idea that eating them will make us happy?

The other factor is that, it should go without saying, if you’re sitting on the couch watching TV, you’re sitting on the couch, and you’re not burning calories the way you would if you were doing any of the things the people on television in the Olympics are doing.  The technology indeed exists, with iPhones and the like, that would let you actually watch the Olympics while you’re skiing or bobsledding, but it’s not recommended for the obvious reason that if you ski into a tree, you might break your iPhone, and they are notoriously difficult to repair.

The right way to watch the Olympics is to watch for an hour or two, then go do something outside while you’re still inspired.  Tell your kids the athletes on the television spent a lot more time skiing than they ever spent watching skiing on television.  I like to go sledding with my son, and when we go, I make sure he walks back up the hill unassisted, just to burn calories.  I also make him carry my golf clubs.  I probably have a few more years before he figures out it has nothing to do with sledding.

In 1962, when I was nine, a Minnesota third-grader, the UN passed a resolution banning testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere.  Before the treaty went into effect, the nuclear powers detonated 17 thermonuclear devices in the stratosphere, putting enough dust in the air to lower the earth’s temperature by half a degree, causing inordinate snowfalls throughout the Northern hemisphere, a preview of nuclear winter. 

I recall walking to school down white trenches, snow piled higher than my head.  Parents often exaggerate how bad things were when they were kids, the actual facts lost in the fog of memory, but we really did have a lot of snow, thanks to “Our Friend, the Atom.”

You learn, on the frigid Minneapolis playgrounds and windswept outdoor hockey rinks, not to complain, because everybody is just as cold as you are, and you get no sympathy for whining.  You learn how to handle it.  You have no choice.

My mother told me stories about pioneers who got trapped in blizzards and, to survive, had to kill their horse, slice the horse’s belly open and crawl inside for warmth.  I pictured the EMTs finding me, stuck inside a frozen Clydesdale, saying, “Who’s the horse’s ass inside the horse’s ass,” but I got the point:  “Be careful.  Think.  Winter can kill you.”

As the stay-at-home dad, it’s your job (beyond keeping track of gloves and hats—good luck with that) to properly prepare your kid for winter play, sledding parties, fort building, snowball fights and such.  Fortunately, the technology to help us survive winter has improved dramatically since I was a kid.  Much has changed, though much has stayed the same.  With the Olympics approaching, your kids may be more inclined to play outside in the snow.

Here are some rules and general principles to keep them safe and warm:

No cotton.  The cozy waffled-cotton long underwear you probably wore as a kid feels good against the skin, but cotton holds moisture, which is why it keeps you comfortable in the summer, cooling the skin as the moisture evaporates.  That’s the last thing you want in winter.  All the new long underwear is made from synthetic fibers that wick away H2O. 

Dress in layers.  Keep the new wick-away fibers against the skin, then an insulating layer, fleece or wool, NOT COTTON, to hold in the heat but let the moisture pass through.  An outer wind-shell will add more than twenty degrees to how warm your child feels.

Cover the peripheries.  Hats, gloves, socks and boots.  If you lose heat from the head, hands or feet (which are to your body what the radiator is to your car), your blood cools and your core temperature lowers, and then your body will close blood flow to the peripheries to avoid hyperthermia.  Keep feet, hands and head dry.   

Eat grilled cheese sandwiches before play.  Remember that a calorie is a unit of heat, not a measure of socially undesirable appearance.  Food is fuel for your child’s inner fire, and as long as your child keeps moving inside his layers of clothing, his body temperature will remain elevated and he’ll stay warm, possibly even work up a sweat.  If he runs out of gas, he’ll cool.  Fat is the best fuel, like heavy hardwood in your fireplace; carbs are softwoods like birch or pine; sugar is kindling, birch bark or pine needles.  Avoid sugar.

Stay hydrated.  Winter air is much drier than we realize.  You can tell if you haven’t had enough water if your pee turns orange. Or if your kid leaves you an orange message in a snowbank:  D a d d y   I ‘ m   t h i r s t y.

Don’t be stupid.  My friend Paul Shurke, who teaches winter camping skills in the frozen woods of Northern Minnesota, led a dogsled expedition to the North Pole, crossing vast expanses of treacherous frozen waters and floating ice floes, but fell through the ice in the lake in front of his house, surviving only because he happened to have a handful of large nails in his pocket, which he used to claw his way out of the frigid water.  Don’t let your kids play on frozen lakes or ponds unless there are lots of grownups—big fat grownups—on the ice to supervise. Tell your child that if he see’s a dog (or a big fat grown up) fall through the ice, don’t try to save it.  Don’t let him sled any place called “Dead Man’s Hill,” and if he owns one, make him wear a helmet and always look up the hill for anything incoming. No snowballs thrown at someone who isn’t looking, and no licking frozen metal fence poles.    

If you prepare properly, the world of winter is a big giant play land.  If your child is forewarned, he’s forearmed.  Maybe at bedtime, you can tell your little darlings the story of the Donner Party.

One more tip from a native Minnesotan: if you’re in a sauna, pour beer on the heating element—it smells like baked bread, only better.

Photo by ljcybergal

The Dude is probably no stay-at-home-dad’s idea of a good role model.  He’s impaired, irresponsible, lacks good hygiene, and he would probably send the kids to school with their shirts inside out.

It’s a tribute to the acting skills of Jeff Bridges, who portrayed The Dude in the movie.  He’s currently appearing in “Crazy Heart,” playing a hard-living down-on-his-luck musician named Bad Blake, another in his series of misfits and outsiders.  There’s talk of a long deserved Oscar nomination.

In real life, Bridges is neither a misfit nor an outsider.  He is one of Hollywood’s best known family men, with a durable marriage, father to three girls, whose privacy he steadfastly protects.  He’s a nice guy.

“My dad had a joy that was contagious,” Bridges told me in an interview.  “People tell me all the time how much they liked working with him.”

Bridges has the same infectious joy about him, a ready smile and an easy laugh.  When you talk to him, he tilts his head and really listens.  He may have gotten that from his mother.

“My mom had this thing she would do every day that we just called ‘Time.’  It meant that for one hour, each day, each of her kids, me, my brother Beau or my sister Lucinda, could get one hour of her undivided attention.  Anything that kid wanted to do.  No telephones, no distractions.  If we wanted to put make-up on each other, or crawl under the dining room table, we’d do that.  As a teenager, I’d just say, “Rub my back, mom,” and she’d do that.  Sometimes I wonder how she managed to find the time, but I know it wasn’t a sacrifice.  She was getting something out of it too.”

No telephones?

No distractions?

No Blackberries, email, voice mail, texting…

Is it still possible?

Sometimes it seems like the world is one big incubator for Attention Deficit Disorder.  One comes to feel, working from home, meeting the school bus, helping with homework and struggling to multi-task, the only way to accomplish everything one needs to accomplish in a day, that it’s easy to give divided time, and much harder to set everything aside and focus strictly on your kid.  Harder still when you have more than one.

Divided attention is what you need.

Undivided time is what your child needs.

The Dude abides.

photo by shutter-bunny

If you’re like me, you considered it your duty, as a good father, to eat more than your share of rich fatty sugar-laden foods over the holidays, as a way of protecting your family from obesity.  The instinct to protect one’s offspring is hardwired throughout the animal kingdom and a noble calling, so if you’ve gained 10-15 pounds since Thanksgiving, you are to be commended.

Now, Pork-Boy, it’s time to take your New Years’ resolutions seriously and lose a few pounds, particularly if part of your stay-at-home dad’s duties is to buy and prepare foods for your family.  Odds are, you’re not the only one in your family who gained weight, or needs to shed it, including your kids.

I won’t bother you with a lot of statistics about the ongoing obesity epidemic (two thirds of adults and about forty percent of all children in this country are overweight) or what the health costs are (diabetes, hypertension, chronic heart disease etc) — if you don’t know this stuff already, you’ve been in a coma for the last ten years.

Kidding aside, it’s important.  Bad eating habits are learned young - rarely do fat kids come from thin parents.  If you really want to protect your kids, implement the following changes:

Cut sugar. Sugar sends a signal to your body: “burn me first, store fat for later.”  We evolved to store as much fat as possible as a defense against future famines, but the mechanism works against us when there aren’t any famines, and there aren’t, at least in this country.  If you avoid sugar, you’ll burn fat.  Eating sweets before bed is the worst thing you can do.  Dr. Naomi Neufeld, Los Angeles pediatric endocrinologist and author of Kidshape (Rutledge Hill, Nashville, 2004, with yours truly as co-author) recommends Splenda as a substitute, though years of studies have shown Sweet ‘N’ Low to be safe too.  And don’t fool yourself, thinking fruit juices are good because they have the word “fruit” on them — some have more sugar in them than sodas.

Cut fat.   Duh.  Two percent instead of whole milk, margarine instead of butter, chicken or turkey instead of beef or tofu instead of chicken, and just a bit of olive oil to fry with.  Read labels and if you see something at the store that says “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil,” don’t buy it, and hide it so no one else can either.

Cut portions. Don’t buy the myth that kids naturally know when to stop eating.  The “natural” inclination, remember, is to eat beyond satiation to prepare for famine.  Give them half portions, and seconds if they ask for more.

Increase fiber.  Whole grains make you feel full while only partially digesting.  There are whole grain versions today of virtually everything previously made from refined flour, pastas, cookies, crackers, even cereal.  If you’re not convinced, get a loaf of commercial white bread, soak it in water, wad it up in a ball and then ask yourself if you want that in your stomach.  Or your kid’s.  You don’t.

Increase exercise.  Get up and move until you’re tired.  Thirty minutes a day with your kids, key word:, “with your kids.”  You cannot isolate an overweight child, make them eat special foods or do special exercises, when no one else in the family is doing it.  It makes them feel isolated and lonely, and that makes kids eat more. “Children are emotional eaters, which is why when I treat childhood obesity, I work with the whole family, not just the child.  Think about your comfort foods,” says Neufeld.  “Odds are, it’s something with a lot of sugar and fat in it that your mom gave you when you were little.”

It brings you comfort, now, because it was rich, but more because your mom gave it to you.  Eating together, and exercising together, makes kids feel loved and safe.  It’s hard in the winter, but you can think of something, wrestling with boys on the bed, dancing or doing Wii Fit with girls, or get a family membership at a gym if you can.

Increase your awareness. Instead of conferring with diet books (though Kidshape is a good one, if I do say so myself), to stay motivated, get one of those digital picture frames, mount it on your refrigerator door, then go online and fill it full of downloaded pictures of fat people, and click here or here if you’re having trouble finding any.  It will remind you of your goals, and possibly cause you to lose your appetite.  Or put a mirror on the floor next to your bathroom scale so you can see your gut from below.

But don’t step on it because you’ll break it, Fatso.

“Eating healthy 80% of the time is realistic,” says Neufeld.  “If you set unrealistic goals, you might feel like a failure.  It’s not difficult, but the trick is staying on track.”

photo by imapix

You did it. You booked the trip to Disney World. You saved money by choosing an off-peak time, prior to most schools’ spring break. It’s all paid for, and it’s going to be fun. It really is. It’s going to be expensive, but you get what you pay for—if children didn’t adore Disneyland or Disney World, they would have gone out of business years ago. By “they,” I mean Disney, not children.

This isn’t about Disney World or Disneyland.  I may write about that at some later date, but for now, I want you to check your itinerary, specifically the date of your return flight.  Is it, by any chance, February 7^th?

Nice going, doofus—that’s the same day as the Superbowl.

Take a moment to slap yourself on the forehead.

Lucky for you (and not for me), I’ve been there and done that. There are three things you can do.

The first is to change your reservations, though both the airlines and the hotel may charge you more fees than you’re willing to pay.

The second is to pretend you did it on purpose. If you can convince your family you knowingly gave up the Superbowl because you put your family first and knew they’d have more fun at Disneyworld, you will score huge points.

Third, accept responsibility for your mistake and make the best of it. It’s not as bad as you think. Why?

Because when it happened to me in 2008, you couldn’t get Internet access on an airplane, but now, you might be able to watch the game on your laptop if you have Wifi. Unfortunately, once you land at the airport, you’ll have to shut it off and listen to the radio until you get home.

That’s not as bad as you think either. Here’s how I know. In 2008, my team, the New England Patriots (I’d lived in Massachusetts for over twenty years) were undefeated and were playing the New York Giants. We departed Orlando in the early afternoon and arrived in Newark at the end of the first half.  I jumped on the shuttle to retrieve the car from long term parking while my wife lugged the bags and the kid to the curb. We were on the freeway by the start of the second half. At first, I couldn’t believe I was going to miss the entire game, probably the one Superbowl I’d wanted to see more than any other, given that the Patriots were striving for a perfect season.

Then, I realized something.

There was no traffic whatsoever, because everybody was home watching the game. We sailed through the tollbooths.

It also occurred to me that I was probably one of maybe a few dozen men in all of America who were listening to the Superbowl on the radio. If you’re a football fan, you will find a way to watch the game on television, unless extraordinary circumstances prevent you. If you’re not a fan, you’re not going to watch it or listen to the radio.

As the Giants fought off Tom Brady’s attempts at one of his patented come-backs, I realized how unique my situation was. On Superbowl television, big national sponsors spend millions of dollars to place their exotic and expensive advertisements during the commercial breaks. People watch, in fact, just for the commercials. On Superbowl radio, I was hearing ads from local hardware stores and corner groceries. I think the radio stationed actually paid the advertisers to give them something they could run. During some of the breaks, the announcers kept talking because they didn’t have any commercials to fill the gaps.

On Superbowl television, there is always copious amounts of hoopla, with celebrity announcers and superstar celebrity half-time performers and celebrity cutaways. On Superbowl radio, the hoopla factor was zero, not a celebrity mentioned or interviewed, because they were all on television, and the announcing duties had been handed over to whoever was at the bottom of the radio station’s on-air talent list because the station knew nobody would be listening and the announcers at the top of the list were watching the game at the bar around the corner on Hi-Def.

I began to experience the extraordinary sensation of being transported back in time, back to the golden days of football on the AM radio, when all you got were the plays, and the crowd noise, and little more.  I felt like a kid again, and pictured giants in high top black cleats, with bare arms in the snow, toothless men with flat top haircuts, Y.A. Tittle throwing it up against Johnny Unitas, all blood and mud and glory. It was football in a very pure and unadulterated form, an extraordinary game, it turned out, the Giants upsetting my Patriots, but heard over the radio, the game reached epic proportions in ways television could never achieved, the action conjured in the imagination, not simply conveyed in pixels and computer-graphics.

It was almost better, on radio.

If I have a choice, I will always watch the game on television, but if you’re flying home from Disney World and you don’t have a choice, radio’s not so bad.

A lot of parents don’t like snow days, days when we are unexpectedly forced to cancel any other plans we might have made and struggle to find ways to entertain our children for long blocks of time.

Not me—I use snow days as an opportunity to do a little home-schooling.  Most recently, I decided it was time my eight year-old learned a bit about statistics.

“Hey Jack,” I said as I prepared his macaroni and cheese. “Did you know that according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Abstract #406 of Major U.S. Weather Disasters 1980-1999, 490 people died from winter storms, or about 25 a year, and 465 died in hurricanes, and 283 died being hit by tornadoes, 236 people perished in floods, and 25,456 people perished in droughts.  People think winter weather is dangerous, but actually, hot dry weather is much worse.”

“51.9502 times worse,” my eight-year-old said.

“Exactly,” I said, looking out the window to see the snow falling lightly.

“But if that’s true, shouldn’t they cancel school because of droughts?”

“No, because schools usually have plenty of water.  And air conditioning.”

“I’ll bet they cancelled school today because the roads are slippery.”

“Actually,” I said, draining the macaroni and stirring in the milk and the orange powdered cheese flavoring, “according to government statistics, in 2001, there were 5,326 fatal crashes per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in the snowy months of January and February, but 6,999 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in the months of July and August.”

“Well gosh, daddy,” Jack said.  “Don’t people drive more when it’s not snowing?’

“They do, but those figures are per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, regardless of road or weather conditions. If you factor that in, there were 33,311 fatal crashes under normal conditions during the year, 2,826 fatal crashes under rainy conditions and only 690 fatal crashes caused by snow or ice, conditions responsible for only 2.9% of all crashes and 1.8% of all fatalities.  According to the National Weather Service, between 1988 and 1995, there were 4101 weather-related deaths and 26,441 injuries, but winter weather accounted for only 372 deaths—”

“About 9%…”

“Don’t interrupt, but yes,” I told him. “Eat your mac and cheese. And 5,690 injuries.”

“About 20%,” he said.  “This mac and cheese is the best you ever made.”

“Thanks, buddy,” I said. 

“I guess it’s just more dangerous because we live in the north, where there’s more snow.”

“Actually,” I explained, “according to government highway safety statistics, the warm southern states of Arizona, Texas, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia, combined, average 29.91 fatalities per 100,000 drivers in a year, while the wintry northern states of Alaska, Montana, Minnesota, Michigan, Massachusetts and Maine, combined, average only 21.75 deaths per 100,000 drivers.”

“Wow,” he said, reaching for his Nintendo DS.  “I guess it must have been different when you were a kid.  Today, with all the gigantic SUVs on the road with all wheel drive, anti-lock brakes, GPS navigation devices, air bags, and the fact that moms and dads all have cell-phones, driving kids to school has never been safer.”

“That’s correct,” I told him. “When I was a kid, growing up in Minneapolis, I never missed a day due to snow, from kindergarten through high school, and we had to walk to school.”

“I know,” he said, rolling his eyes.  “You walked twenty miles, up hill each way…”

“Actually, it was only a mile to junior and senior high,” I said.”Four blocks to grade school. But I never missed a day, and sometimes we had two feet of snow.  It’s very cold in Minneapolis.  This was before global warming.” 

“How much did it snow today?”

“Two inches.”

“So WTF aren’t I in school?” he said, bringing his plate to the sink.

“I have no idea.” 

“What do you want to do now?” he asked.  The clock read 7:04, a.m.

“Kill myself,” I said.  “Just kidding.”

“Wanna wrestle?”

“Sure.”

If you’re like me, you’re asking yourself, am I going to get my kid a video game for Christmas?

If you’re like me, you already know the answer—of course you’re going to buy them video games.  Kids love them, and you know it’s going to make his or her little face light up.  At the same time, so would buying your kid crack cocaine, and that would be a terrible idea.

If the debate rages in your household, here are some arguments to help you pretend you’ve considered both sides of the argument, before you buy video games and make your child very happy (hint: that’s the point).

Claim:  Video Games Turn Your Kid Into A Couch Potato.

Stay-At-Home-Dad says: then get rid of the couch. Make them play standing up, while wearing weights. Yes, the games where you just sit there promote sedentary behavior, but my kid uses vigorous body language when we play chess.  When he plays Wii games involving actual motion, he works up such a sweat we have to give him a bath afterwards.

Claim:  Video Games Are Addictive.

Kids obsess about anything. When I was a kid, Tinker Toys were addictive.  All game consoles come equipped with timers that let you limit how long your child can play.

Claim:  Video Games Promote Violence.

Only if two brothers end up wrestling over who controls the X-Box (and that’s fun too). Most of the pacifists I know, at least the ones from my generation, grew up watching westerns and cop shows when people blew each other away with guns without cessation. Watching a road-runner cartoon never made me want to drop an anvil on somebody’s head from the top of a canyon precipice, nor did the way Tom and Jerry regularly abused each other cause me to lose any sleep.  Kids know the difference between reality and fantasy.  Some argue that the legitimate function of fantasy is to work out violent feelings. Plus games have ratings—you can monitor what’s appropriate.

Claim:  Video Games Waste Time.

The military used to only allow men or women who’d previously piloted actual airplanes to operate unmanned aerial vehicles, but now they’re also selecting joystick jockeys on the basis of prior video gaming experience and facility. You may not want your 8-year-old flying a Predator armed with Hellfire missiles (”Sorry teacher, I blew up my homework… and I know where you live…”) but the odds are, gaming skills will have applications in future civilian tech jobs where robotics replace human hands and eyes. Surgeons already operate using devices similar to game controls. Plus every kid I know wants to grow up to be a game designer. It’s an industry that’s not going away.

Claim:  Video Games Are Unaffordable, In This Tough Economy.

They’re expensive, sure, but if you hired a babysitter to play with your kid for the same number of hours he’ll spend playing his video game, it would cost you a lot more—and it’s time you can get your own work done and theoretically earn back what the game cost you. Plus you can buy used games, or swap games with other parents whose kids have grown tired of them, wrap and re-gift.  If your kid catches on, blame it on Santa.

Claim: Video Games Deter Socialization, Isolating Kids In Digital Fantasy Worlds.

Actually, your child’s popularity is directly proportionate to the number of games he owns and is expert in—they ask each other all the time what levels they’ve reached or what Pokemon or Super Mario characters they’ve unlocked, plus if you have a lot of cool games, other children will be begging to come over for play dates, and your child’s social calendar will overflow with eager companions.

Claim:  Kids Would Learn More, Reading Books.

This is true, in which case they should also read books. You can use video games to bribe your kid into doing almost anything, including reading—tell him if he reads for an hour, he can play for an hour. Many games have narratives, plots, character development, tension and suspense, crises, denouements, and operate on the player’s consciousness the same way a story might, requiring memory skills, empathy, prediction, logic and puzzle solving. They don’t generally use words, but they use pictures, and the art in some games is mind blowing. A game like Spoor teaches the concept of evolution in a way that is abstract but clear.

The key is to keep it under control and limit how important it becomes, set a strict time limit, and then expect to double it, because if you give your kid an hour, you will need another hour of “Just one more minute…” for your kid to finish and save the game (so as not to lose the progress he’s made) and shut the damn thing off.  Hide the hammers, because you will be tempted, from time to time, to smash the game devices in a thousand pieces, at which time you will need to remember—you have only yourself to blame.

Or possibly Santa.

A recent study I read says everybody lies.

Okay—I made that up.  There wasn’t any study (or if there was, I didn’t read it), but it is true that lying is universal, beginning when we’re toddlers.

My son Jack’s classmate Sidney is a legendary example. Jack has cited Sidney’s accomplishments on numerous occasions. “Hey daddy—guess what?  Sidney has a girlfriend,” or, “Do you know what?  Sidney has a moustache.”

We assured Jack that Sidney has neither. Sidney is a diminutive sweet round-faced cheerful child full of enthusiasm, always smiling and ready for adventure. Nobody can dislike Sidney. Nobody can believe anything Sidney says, either.

Po Bronson, author of the new book Nurture Shock; New Thinking About Children, might call Sidney’s prevarications “a coping mechanism… a way to get attention. They might be attempting to compensate, feeling they’re slipping behind their peers.” Sidney is, bear in mind, the most diminutive of all Jack’s schoolmates, short stuff in need of tall tales just to keep even.

According to studies, many using variations on the classic “peek-test” where children are told they will get a reward if they don’t peek at something and then they’re left alone with the temptation, girls lie as often as boys, a third of all three- year-olds peek (but most admit it if challenged), 80% of all 4 year-olds peek and 80% of those say they didn’t when challenged, and by the time they’re six, about 96% of all children lie about once an hour. They know it’s wrong, but only because they know they will be punished if they’re caught, or that mommy or daddy will be unhappy with them.  It isn’t until age eleven that half know lying is wrong because it erodes trust, and about a quarter know it makes you feel guilty, and the rest still say it’s wrong because you’ll get punished if you’re caught.

“Children don’t start out thinking lies are okay and generally realize they’re bad,” Bronson writes. “The opposite is true. They start out thinking all deception is bad and slowly realize that some types are okay.”

For a lot of kids, lying becomes a strategy simply because it works, gaining them good favor, from parents or among peers, or the attention they desire.

I saw it with my own eyes when we had Sidney over for a play date.  When I made the boys root beers floats, Sidney grabbed a bottle of Hershey’s chocolate syrup from the fridge and squeezed about half a cup into his glass, assuring me he always made his root beer floats this way, though he took a sip and barely touched it after that.  Later, the three of us took the dog to a wooded park with a lake where, if Jack saw a fish ten inches long, Sidney saw a fish six feet long.  When Jack caught a toad, Sidney caught a “special sandy toad” (he showed it to me—it was just a toad), and when Jack caught a frog, Sidney caught “a poisonous frog!” Again, just a frog.

“Should I kiss it?” he asked me.

“Not if it’s poisonous,” I advised.

“I kissed a poisonous frog before,” he said. “It didn’t hurt me. I have fifteen poisonous frogs at my house.”

Then he warned Jack not to fall in the pond, because it was 1000 feet deep.

If you’re saying to yourself, “My kid wouldn’t do that, ” note that studies also show neither parents nor trained professionals, teachers or customs officers, are particularly adept at telling when kids are lying. We all want to believe our kids are honest and truthful, but we also teach them lying is okay when we show them, by example, that white lies are okay, encouraging them to write thank-you notes when Great Aunt Sylvia gives them an age-inappropriate pair of bunny slippers for Christmas, saying, “Just tell her you loved them or you’ll hurt her feelings…”

Jack occasionally makes pronouncements begging any number of questions.  “Hey Daddy,” he offered recently, “Do you know what the cure for the common cold is?  Cheese.”  He is surely no more immune to the pressure to lie than any other kid.  The key, Bronson says, is not to emphasize or increase the punishment for lying, which produces more lying, but rather to stress how happy you both will be, how rewarding it is, if your child tells the truth.

“Parents often entrap their kids,” says Bronson. “Last week, I put my three-and-a- half-year-old daughter in exactly that position. With disapproval in my voice, I asked, ‘Did you draw on the table, Thia?’ My tone gave away that she’d done something wrong. ‘No, I didn’t,’ my daughter said, lying to me for the first time.  I only had myself to blame.”

My son is also starting to develop his own B.S. detector, which will surely be a useful skill, as an adult.  He now knows that everything Sidney tells him must be taken with more than a grain of salt.  At dinner, a while ago, he told us that Sidney had told him something, but Jack wasn’t sure if it was true.  “What did he tell you?” I asked.

“He said he killed a man.”

He went on to explain that Sidney claimed they’d had a robber in their house but Sidney had tripped him and the robber fell down the stairs and out the window and died. I said that seemed doubtful. Jack thought so too.

But we still love Sidney.

I’ve told Jack the best reason not to lie, in the words of Mark Twain:  “If you  tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

photo credit unkown

The Walt Disney Company, owner of the Baby Einstein franchise, announced recently that they will offer refunds to buyers of Baby Einstein videos and CDs purchased in the belief that watching television could turn babies age 6-24 months into geniuses. Apparently, according to disgruntled customers, it didn’t work. About a third of all babies in American owned at least one video or CD, according to a study done in 2003, with another estimate giving Baby Einstein about 90% of the market for infant electronic media, totaling to about $200,000,000 in annual sales.

That’s a lot of stupid babies.

Or at least that’s the message you’ll be sending, parents, if you apply for a refund. You might as well say it straight to their face: “Sorry, kid, but you’ll never make the leap from Galilean x‘ = x - vt relativity to the linear Lorentzian transformation of intervals in Minkowski space, x = 0, t = 0, or intuit the variations of simultaneity or postulate gravitational time dilation or metric tensors redefining the topology of space-time—you just don’t have it in you.”

What two-year-old wants to hear that?

But for my younger readers—kids, if you’re six years old today, you’re already smarter than Einstein was. He was born in 1879. When he was six, the smartest people in the world were still trying to figure out how to make a phone call from Boston to Providence, and inventing things like light bulbs or machines that could give sheep haircuts. You, on the other hand, have probably already unlocked half the Pokemons in your DS. If you went back to 1884 and gave Einstein a Nintendo DS, he would just chew on the corners.

Still kicking your Leggos and saying to yourself, “I’ll never be another Einstein…”

Buck up.

First of all, in relative terms, and this isn’t just a theory, when Einstein was your age, he was stupid too, though the term they used back then was “slow,” in which sense the Baby Einstein videos and CDs delivered as promised:  they didn’t say they would turn you into a grown-up Albert Einstein, who was indeed pretty darn smart. The real Baby Einstein had difficulty talking and it took him a long time to learn how to read because he may have been dyslexic. His parents thought he was retarded, and they were common trades-people, not teachers or writers or artists.  His mother thought his head was too big, but his grandmother just thought he was fat. He was shy and withdrawn, but pretty good at jigsaw puzzles. In the classroom, he was disruptive and not a good listener, and he got kicked out of high school for being a trouble maker. He spent a lot of time making card houses with his sister and staring at a compass his father gave him, wondering why it kept pointing north.

Second, according to Harvard psychologist and Professor of Cognition and Education Howard Gardner, there’s more than one kind of intelligence.  Gardner lists seven:  linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal and intrapersonal, the last two sometimes subsumed under the heading “emotional intelligence.” Einstein had the logical-mathematical kind of brain, no argument there, and he played the violin, but he wasn’t always good with people, had a lousy short-term memory, couldn’t hit a fastball if his life depended on it, and nobody called him a fun date or a barrel of laughs.

Everybody’s intelligence expresses itself differently, each of us a unique concatenation of gifts and flaws.

Third, in America, being stupid is not an impediment to success.  You can think gravity is just a theory and still get elected Governor of Alaska, or make a statement like, “The problem with the French is, they don’t have a word for ‘entrepreneur,’” and be elected President of the United States!

Fourth, the jury is still out on you. Everyone develops at a different speed, in a different way. Thomas Edison’s elementary school teacher thought he was “addled.”  Mark Twain, Henry Miller, Raymond Chandler, W.B. Yeats and Johann von Goethe were all late bloomers. Grandma Moses didn’t start painting until, well —they don’t call her “Grandma Moses” for nothing.

Fifth, intelligence is itself relative—a lot of highly intelligent people are jerks. It’s not as important as if you’re kind, or honest, or loving.

One last word to parents: if you really thought your infant would be smarter if you let him watch television, and you weren’t just fooling yourself, using the TV as an electronic babysitter while you cleaned the bathroom, telling yourself it was good for them, then you’re not exactly an Einstein either. There’ve only been ten or twenty thousand studies done, over the last fifty years, indicating that watching TV isn’t appropriate for children under the age of two.

By the way —the Land Before Time videos didn’t teach paleontology either.

My son went as a robber (currently his biggest fear).  My temptation, after reading how schools were sanitizing Halloween, was to arm him with a real gun and live ammunition, but I was afraid if he actually shot somebody or knocked over a liquor store, it would hurt his chances of getting into an Ivy League college.

I’m kidding of course.

We have no hopes of getting him into an Ivy League college.

But am I the only one who thinks elementary schools are missing the point, by a wide margin?  Adopting practices to ensure a safe positive non-scary politically correct Halloween is like throwing a low-cal non-fat carb-free sugarless Thanksgiving Feast.  Once a year, you’re supposed to do the opposite of what you do the rest of the year, just so you can appreciate the difference.  Once a year, you indulge your impulses, eschew moderation, give in, relax and realize, the next day, that civilization did not collapse—that it’s stronger than that.

Moreover, denying a child the opportunity to scare or be scared might have larger consequences.  The reason to put on a mask and scare a kid is to take the mask off, and laugh, and teach him not everything that looks scary is scary.  The reason to turn out the lights and tell a scary story is to turn the lights back on when you’re done and demonstrate that fear has a beginning, a middle and an end, but especially an end.  Schools that strive for hyper-safety, and forbid competitive play on the playground, or tell the boys they can’t wrestle, or only teach stories about hungry caterpillars and goodnight moons, do a disservice.

According to renowned child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, in his classic work, The Uses of Enchantment (1976, p.10): “The deep inner conflicts originating in our primitive drives and our violent emotions are all denied by much of children’s literature, and so a child is not helped in coping with them… Children not having their ids in conscious control, need stories which permit at least fantasy satisfaction of these ‘bad’ tendencies, and specific models for their sublimation.”

In other words, children, as they develop emotionally, apart from physically or cognitively, begin to experience all the darker feelings adults know, violent urges, jealousy, envy, anger, shame, hurt. Denying them the right to explore these feelings symbolically, through play, denies them permission to feel them, when they have no choice but to feel them, so they repress them as unacceptable, having been given no alternative way to overcome them. (I fear I can’t write enough about fear. See here for more.)

Bettelheim notes that children depend on fantasy to imaginatively resolve troubling issues, such that the wider and more varied a child’s fantasy life, the more tools he’ll have, later on, to cope with adult realities. It’s like an emotional immune system that grows stronger only if it’s challenged.

Maurice Sendak’s classic 1963 children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are, is a perfect example, a story where a mischievous boy, Max, acts up, gets sent to his room, escapes, travels to a world of scary monsters, joins them, becomes their king, gets it out of his system, and goes home again, where he finds he’s still loved, and his supper is still hot. Max’s darker feelings are acknowledged, honored, given full voice, celebrated and, in the end, subdued but never denied.  Now Where the Wild Things Are has been made into a brilliant film—one, some parents are complaining, is too scary. When Sendak was asked by an interviewer what he would say to parents concerned that their kids might be frightened by the film, he said what Bruno Bettelheim probably wished he could have said, were he not a renowned child psychologist.

“I’d tell them to go to hell,” Sendak replied.

And to the kids who think the movie is too scary?

“Go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like.”

There are plenty of real things for children to be afraid of as they grow. Hopefully, my son will have had some practice facing his fears, having rehearsed it in his fantasies. Halloween teaches kids how to joke about their fears, the way I joked, earlier, about my son getting into college. Of course we want the best schools for him. Before that, however, we want him to be happy and well adjusted, in which case, let the wild rumpus begin.