A child’s world today includes nonstop media messages that encourage very limiting gender identities.  It’s easy enough to find the toys for girls in any toy store—just look for the isles that feature an abundance of pink packaging.  There you’ll find pretty dresses, makeup and a variety of dolls and accessories that easily compliment the popular television shows or movies they’re based on.  The boys isles are similar- with very masculine colors, and often, violent toys.    As Diane Levin pointed out in her book, So Sexy So Soon, “girls learn at a very young age that their value is determined by how beautiful, thin, “hot” and sexy they are.  And boys are taught to judge girls based on how close they come to an artificial, impossible and shallow ideal.”

It would be nice to shield our children from certain images or messages we deem inappropriate but that’s not always realistic.  How many times can you say “NO” to your son or daughter and still encourage open communication?  In the book, co-written with Jean Kilbourne, the authors list twelve reasons why just saying no is not enough and they include the fact that it’s an exhausting, never-ending process and it doesn’t solve the problem.  You can say no to certain television programs or computer usage at your own house, but that doesn’t stop the exposure at a friend’s house or shopping mall.  You can forbid your daughter from wearing a certain style of clothing, but more than a few have been known to change their attire at a friend’s house or the bathroom at school.

The problem, they point out, is not that children today are learning about sex and sexuality, but that the lessons they are learning have a negative impact on their understanding of gender, sexuality and relationships. 

The book offers real-life examples of situations parents face everyday—from someone’s daughter obsessed with being thin so boys will like her more, to someone else’s son viewing pornography at a play date.  The authors show how a willingness to listen and really hear what your child is saying, and resisting the urge to put our own interpretations on what our children are telling us can go a long way to helping our children navigate the minefield of confusing and, often, disturbing messages they encounter. 

Diane Levin is co-founder of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood www.commercialfreechildhood.org and Teachers Resisting Unhealthy Children’s Entertainment www.truceteachers.org.  Both sites offer excellent resources for parents and for teachers.  

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My interview last night with Vanessa Van Petten was enlightening and although my own daughter has yet to hit her teenage years, it’s good to know that there’s a resource out there for parents to see things from the teen perspective.  Vanessa wrote her parenting book, You’re Grounded!  when she was just 17 years old after being grounded by her father.  She started it as a response to the poor advice she found in other parenting books her Dad was reading at the time. 

She interviewed over 700 teenagers and parents for the book, and now has a website and blog, www.radicalparenting.com  which she writes with 75 other teenage writers.  She is truly giving parenting advice from the teen perspective. 

Her belief and commitment to honesty and open communication is evident throughout her book and the interview as well.  She stresses to parents that snooping through their teen’s rooms and personal items is a big mistake because trust is so important and can take years to regain once it’s been breached.    She offers realistic alternatives to nagging teens about everything from who they hang out with to the amount of time they spend studying.  And she cautions parents:  the more you restrict and hold your teenager back, the more they will want to explode when outside of your supervision. 

Her book addresses everything from drugs and alcohol, to teen dating and other social pressures.  And she not only offers advice to parents but speaks directly to teens as well with advice on the importance of building trust with your parents, being respectful of their rules and apologizing when you are wrong.

Her site is a great resource for teens and parents alike and tackles current trends and topics impacting today’s youth. 

Listen to the interview

I enjoyed talking with Lenore Skenazy on Tuesday evening about her book, Free Range Kids, as part of our Summit Series for Families and if you haven’t read her book yet, I highly recommend it.  I admitted to her that I am not raising a free-range kid yet, but that I’m taking baby steps in that direction because I agree with so much of what she says in her book. 

I remember when I was pregnant with my daughter and all the reading I did to prepare for her birth.  I was a nervous wreck and spent the first year of her life obsessing over her eating habits and whether or not she would be suffocated in her crib by a blanket.  When she started going to daycare, we were lucky enough to find one with an older woman who had been in the daycare business for over 30 years, and had been in this particular infant room for the past thirteen.  She was the calm, reassuring voice my daughter and I both needed.  She was the one who told me to stop reading so many books and just come ask her if I had any questions—this, after she criticized some of the advice I was getting from my books.   I’ll admit I had been peppering her a bit too much with my facts and cautionary tales gleaned from every baby book on the market—and it’s true that I had given up my own instincts and common sense in favor of any advice found in my book of the week, but darn it, I didn’t want to screw this up. 

I think its hard today not to worry about letting your kids go out to play by themselves.  We automatically think about all the child abductions and creepy people we keep hearing about every night on the news.  But as the author points out in her book, only 1 in 1.5 million children is abducted and murdered by strangers.  It really isn’t happening more often today than it was years ago, we just hear about it on the news more often.  Statistically, children today are as safe from violent crime as kids who grew up in the seventies were.   To put it in perspective, forty times more kids are killed in car accidents than those who are abducted and killed.  And yet we don’t think twice about putting our children in our cars and driving them to school. 

Maybe it’s time for some common sense.  Instead of teaching our kids not to talk to strangers, teach them never to go off with strangers.  We should let them know that the elderly woman at the grocery store who just smiled at you and said she likes your dress is not a mass murderer about to snatch you away from your mother.  She was just being friendly.  In an old- fashioned way. 

Kids gain confidence from accomplishing things on their own.  So if we want to raise confident, responsible kids, maybe we should spend more time preparing them for life and less time teaching them that they should fear everyone they haven’t met.    

As the author pointed out , Free Range Kids is not about reckless risk-taking.  Lenore Skenazy doesn’t suggest you let you kids go play in traffic.  And there was a common theme between what she believes and what David Elkind pointed out in last week’s session:  We need to trust our kids more. 

Listen to the interview with Lenore Skenazy:

Tuesday Night’s session with Dr. David Elkind was incredible.  I learned a lot from reading his book, The Power of Play, but learned even more from our discussion on Tuesday.  

I have a much better understanding of the importance of play in a child’s social and educational development now, and I am truly thankful that my daughter attends an elementary school that has not eliminated recess in favor of more curriculum. 

Left to their own resources kids are free to use their imagination and creativity to create characters, new games and build relationships.  They figure things out on their own.  They make their own choices.  They explore and they learn.  Unstructured free time is essential to learning.  Kids were learning on their own long before we gave them electronic games and started marketing “educational” products to them and their parents. 

When it comes to giving our kids toys, he encourages us not to give children too many toys, too often (which is sometimes difficult to do when we’re bombarded with toys everywhere—including on our necessary trips to the grocery store).  Make sure the toys you buy encourage imaginative inspiration, not momentary amusement or distraction.   We’ve probably all noticed it: when kids have too many toys they are overwhelmed and move from one toy to another without spending time on any of them.  When the question came up about boys playing with guns, Dr.Elkind advised parents to let the kids create their own guns and weapons.  Boys are going to play cops and robbers and violent games sometimes, but let them use their own creativity to come up with the weapons they use. 

He cautioned against organized sports for kids under seven, pointing out that giving kids an early start in a particular sport doesn’t necessarily give them an edge in that sport as they get older and it sometimes just leads to burn-out.  Kids get enough exercise on their own when let loose outside to play with other kids their age. 

He also acknowledged that things have changed since he was a little boy and that there are legitimate concerns parents have with letting their kids loose outside, but he pointed out that those concerns are more about traffic and number of cars—fast cars, on the street now—not any increased threat of child abductions.   He suggested playing at parks or other areas to let kids just be kids with others their age. 

Much of what Dr. Elkind says goes right along with what Lenore Skenazy points out in her book Free Range Kids.   I’m thrilled to be interviewing her next Tuesday night and hearing from “America’s Worst Mom”.  She, too, encourages us to trust our kids to be kids, don’t give in to the pressure to manage their every moment, and stop letting the media (and your neighbors) convince you that your child will be abducted if you let him out of your site for more than 30 seconds.   This is sure to be a lively discussion so please join our community and participate. 

To purchase The Power of Play