Category: Father’s Opinion

One of the more controversial parenting subjects that has appeared between my own childhood and the current era is the topic of leashes for children. Proponents insist that leashes increase a parent’s sense of ease in dangerous situations while providing a toddler with more range of motion than more traditional forms of restraint, such as…

In a recent Attachment Parenting discussion, it was asked: Do you refer to your children as “children” or “kids”? It was posited in that question that AP and other ostensibly progressively minded parents are more likely to use “child” while more traditional parents are more likely to use “kid.” “Child,” after all, is more respectful….

Prompted by a recent discussion on an Attachment Parenting community, I decided to read the first chapter of NurtureShock: New Thinking about Children, on the subject of praise. In the discussion on the community in question, one person (apparently proudly) announced that she never praises her children, because all praise is bad in that it…

I consider myself to be following an attachment parenting strategy. However, I found myself recognizing very little of what noted author Erica Jong characterizes with that phrase. She speaks at length about martyring mothers, anti-feminist attitudes inherent in the philosophy, and so forth, giving examples like Angelina Jolie as celebrities attachment parents. In a WSJ…

Since I’ve become a father, I’ve gone from fretting from the paucity of AO games to the paucity of EC games. Nintendo, the most family-friendly of the three major console producers, lists only six EC-rated games on its site, three for the DS and three for the Wii. That leaves us to look for E…

The KneeBouncers store sells a tshirt that says, “My computer has been taken over by KneeBouncers.” It speaks the truth. There are many educational websites out there, as well as commercial sites tied to items of interest to older children. But toddlers are a bit of a special market, with very simple interests: Bright colors,…

Because of our affinity for Imperial Roman culture and religion, we made our son a bulla, and bestowed it upon him at his naming ceremony shortly after his birth. A bulla is a Roman amulet which was worn by children until their rite of passage into adulthood. The details of who wore bullae and what…

Apparently, a government interagency group is developing non-binding guidelines for foods which are marketed to minors. If food producers were to follow these guidelines, either the food itself would need to be changed or the marketing thereof. Read more on CNN, HuffPo, and BNet. I’m of two minds on this topic. On the one hand,…

We went to Applebee’s last night for the first time since kidlet started eating Big People food. We were rather shocked that the “children’s menu” was printed in black on white paper, with no logo or anything to indicate it was an official Applebee’s menu. Just the words “Kid’s Menu,” a list of items and…

I was raised as a cultural mutt. Half my family or so on each side is German but largely indifferent to that heritage (with occasional exceptions, such as my mother’s fondness for a specific cookie, I believe it was springerles). The other half of my genetics is “generic Western European.” As a teen, I was…