Walking to School

We live on a block where there are no sidewalks and cars speed down our street at 40 miles per hour.

The sidewalk issue has been a contentious one here in Princeton. For us, having no sidewalks means it’s nearly impossible for us to let our 10-year-old walk to school by himself without putting his life at risk.

This is what we tell ourselves anyway. We walk him to school every day and one of us picks him up after school every day. It’s a time when we get to talk to him about his day and we get to walk off some of our midlife bulge.

But my seventh grader doesn't let us walk him to school anymore. He made it clear from the start of middle school that he wanted nothing to do with us accompanying him to school. He zips off with his friends on his bike and leaves us in the dust.

He's forced to tolerate us when we drive him to school during bad weather and bitter cold. But only until the spring when he’s off again.

I was interested to see the New York Times story on Sunday, “Why Can’t She Walk To School,” that details the dilemma parents face of when to let their kids walk to school by themselves. Some parents have gotten grief from other parents, school administrators and even police for letting their kids go solo.

It made me think about the fact that there are just a handful of kids at my son’s grammar school who walk by themselves. One friend let her children walk home by themselves but only if they had a cell phone that allowed her to track their whereabouts.

I feel slightly embarrassed to be among the legion of parents who accompany their kids everywhere, even to and from school. My parents never dreamed of walking us to school and they drove us only when it was serious rain or snow. No light sprinkle would do.

I want to say that we walked to school without ever having any problems. But now that I think about it, there was that guy who offered us candy to get in his car. We refused and when we came home and told my mom about it, she was understandably upset.

But hey that was in the dark ages. It didn’t occur to my mom to call the police. There were no bulletins that went out warning parents about the man. My mother told us to be careful and tell her if he bothered us again and that was the end of it.

I don’t want to bring back those days. I don't think a little caution is such a bad thing. But at the same time I want kids to have some independence.

For us, the walk to school is more about family time than protection. And it’s more about those speeding cars than it is about child predators. For us, walking to school with our child is all about savoring this last year of grammar school before our youngest child joins his brother and takes off on his own.

There comes a point when even if we insist on holding our kids hands, they let go. That’s when we have to stop our clinging and allow them to walk off without us.

Photo from blog.mlive.com

Even Babies Discriminate Link

The link to the Newsweek Story "Even Babies Discriminate" was wrong in my last posting. Here's the link: http//www.newsweek.com/id/214989/page/2

Do Babies & Kids See Race?

Do babies discriminate between different races? Researchers say they do and that babies are more attracted to the faces of people who look similar to their own family.

While babies and children discriminate between the races more than we might think, parents are still acting as if race doesn't exist or as Steven Colbert says, "I don't see race." I can understand why parents might feel they have to tiptoe around the issue but that's not helping our kids figure out anything.

When Mom and Dad don't teach their kids what they really do think, the kids fill in the blanks themselves, researchers say. The survey of white children aged 5 to 7 showed that children of parents who were not prejudiced themselves said that "almost none" of white people were mean but that "some" or "a lot" of black people were mean, according to an article entitled "Even Babies Discriminate" in the Sept. 5 issue of Newsweek.

Just telling kids "everyone is the same," isn't enough, explains Researcher Briggitte Vittrup, of Texas Woman's University, in an interviewer on NPR's "Tell Me More" today. Parents need to go further and tell children that although people may look different and live in different places, they may be very similar and may like the same toys or the same TV shows.

With no guidance from parents, children pick up on negative messages on television and in society itself, Vittrup says.

When researchers questioned children about their parents' attitudes, 14 percent said their parents didn't like black people and 38 percent said, "I don't know," even when parents weren't prejudiced, according to Newsweek.

In fact, when researcher Briggite Vittrup of Texas Woman's University, asked parents to talk to their children about race, many white parents dropped out of the study because they were so uncomfortable. Black parents are three times more likely to talk about race to their children probably because they feel they should prepare their children for what their race might mean in today's society.

So it all comes down once again to talking to your kids and we can't wiggle out of it. If we want our kids to learn good values about race and a whole host of other topics, it has to start at home.


Photo from doctor2008.wordpress.com

Photo Search

I’ve been going through our photos and there are boxes and boxes of them from the time my husband and I were dating until W. was 3 and R. was 5 years old.

Then they stop. There are very few photos of my kids as big kids. There are the school plays and the big occasions but I’ve concluded that we stopped documenting our kids’ lives when they hit kindergarten.

Some of this is because we’ve gone digital so we don’t store our photos in boxes anymore. They are on discs or in Iphoto. But still, there are surprisingly few photos of our life with the older boys.

This reminds me of my parents who took a ton of photos of me, the oldest, as a baby. Then a lot of photos of Ben, the next olderst, fewer of Alex, the third in line and a very few of Tony, the youngest.

Fortunately, we have friends who take photos of plays and playdates or we might have very little to show our own kids. The kids themselves also take photos but this can sometimes mean 100 pictures of the gecko and three of themselves or other relations

I don’t know what I can tell my kids when they ask us what happened after they left toddlerhood. Did the camera break? Well, yes, a couple of cameras did. Did we lose interest? No. We just got out of the habit. If they say, “That’s lame,” I’ll have to agree.

So, I’m a little sad about all those undocumented moments. I can tell myself that we were too busy living to stop and take a picture but that will be small comfort when I want to look back at my children’s 10th birthdays only to find that we didn’t take any photos. Sigh.

So, my new resolution is to start taking more pictures, even if I have to borrow my son’s camera to do it. As Simon and Garfunkle say in “Bookends: “Preserve your memories. They’re all that’s left you.”

Cell Phone Pressure

My younger son, W., wants a cell phone in the worst way. He has wanted one since he was 8. Now at age 10, he is outraged that we want him to wait until sixth grade, as his brother did, before we buy one for him.

“It’s so unfair,” he complained to me the other day during a long tirade in which he whined, begged, pleaded and offered to pay half the monthly fee.

When W. was 8, I just laughed that he wanted a cell phone. “You’re never away from us,” I said. “Why would you need a cell phone?.”

But now he has dance lessons and rehearsals and there are times when he could probably use a cell phone. Still, I’m reluctant to give in to the pressure of “I need a cell phone.” He doesn’t need a cell phone. He just wants one. Badly.

W. also told me that a kid at his camp made fun of him for not having a cell phone. I found this humorous because I’m sure only a handful of kids at his camp, which is the town recreation camp not some fancy schmancy day camp, don’t have cell phones.

So, that led to a discussion about how “you can’t always get what you want,” as the Rolling Stones say and how there will always be people with more and less than you have.

This line of reasoning didn’t work because W. wants what he wants. And I know that feeling. He doesn’t want to hear about economic realities and he doesn’t want to hear that his brother got a cell phone in sixth grade so he should do. He’s a younger child and he sees it as unjust that he had to wait for two years. R. wasn’t waiting, he says.

“In my day we had to dial our phones from home!” I want to shout. “If we wanted to call home, we had to find a pay phone! Our idea of texting was passing a note in class!”

But this would only get me blank stares. So, I grit my teeth and wait for the next onslaught. Is it our fault that our pampered kids think they should have everything their hearts desire? You bet it is. Should we resist the urge to give in? We should not. We should just say no for as long as we can. Maybe a little deprivation will teach our kids that the Rolling Stones really were right. “But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need.”

Image from caise07.idi.ntnu.no

Watching Obama's Education Speech

I was happy that my son, W., who’s a fifth grader this year, got to watch President Obama’s speech in school yesterday.

I don’t know if any parents objected but W. said he didn’t think any kids in his class were sitting the speech out. Why would they? I fail to see why anyone would object to a president telling children how important it is to study harder, no matter what you think of his politics.

This particular president is in a unique position to make that speech because he himself grew up with a single parent and not much money. As he told the schoolchildren, according to a copy of the prepared speech on the White House website.

“I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork,” Obama told students at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va. as many of the nation's 50 millio schoolchildren tuned in.

“I get it. I know what that’s like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in. “

But Obama said even children who have difficult lives, still have a personal responsibility to do well in school. “Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up,” he said. “No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future. “

W. seemed impressed about Obama's childhood. "He had a hard childhood," W. said. W. was particularly amazed at Obama saying he used to wake up before dawn every day so his mother could tutor him when they lived in Indonesia. When he complainmed talked about his childhood being raised by a single mother. He talked about how she used to wake him up early in the morning to study and when he complained she said, “This is no picnic for me either, buster.”

W. said his teacher told him the speech was “important,” and he thought it was too. “I thought it was about telling us to do well in school because if we don’t do well in school then the future will be bad because we are the people of the future,” W. said.

“I expect great things from each of you,” Obama told the students. “So don’t let us down – don’t let your family or your country or yourself down. Make us all proud. I know you can do it.”

Call me a socialist. But here’s a message that’s as American as apple pie and I’m proud that my son got to hear it.

Photo from the Associated Press

Back to school

It was the first day of school for W. and R. today and miraculously we managed to get everyone up and out of the house on time with no yelling. Yahoo!

I’m hoping we won’t backslide into morning chaos, complete with yelling, crying and whining and I’m just talking about me here. Ha. If we can have this smooth a day every day we will be a happy family.

R. was disappointed to find he had homework on his first day for the first time in eight years. I guess this is the year when reality kicks in. Poor kid.

W. was concerned that they had assigned seating at lunch than about anything else about fifth grade. He was very indignant that they had to sit next to assigned people and had to do an ice-breaking exercise. It was all to make sure the fifth graders socialize with each other.

We had our own anxieties about school starting. We were a little worried because there’s an adorable little girl in W.’s class who sometimes call him weird and picks on him. We’re pretty sure that this is because the little girl likes him.

W. and his friend S. reported that the little girl had whacked them in the hallway. We told them that the little girl liked them both and would probably whack them in the halls every day just to show it. Ah to be in fifth grade again. Although come to think of it, I hated fifth grade because of mean kids in my class.

As for my older son, he sailed away this morning to bike with his friends with a smile and came home looking tired and grumpy. But that may be because he had no one to play with and homework to boot.

I’m still happy that we’re back on schedule. It gives us all some breathing room, even if it does mean that our lives have gone back into overdrive. Summer’s like a long, leisurely drive through the country. But in the end, I like putting it back into high gear.

Illustration from Google Images courtesy of wired.com