Tag Archives: kids

Let’s talk about SEX…and VIOLENCE?

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The other day, I was in the kitchen doing kitcheny-type things (dishes or preparing dinner, I can’t remember which), when DD came up beside me and said something that sounded like the word “sex”. I paused, turned towards her and calmly said, “Excuse me?” She looked at me with a huge grin on her face and said – much louder and more clearly – “SEX!” It’s at this point that I think I made a face much like Ferris Bueller, whenever he gave a glance at the fourth-wall. Uh…

It seems that the little miss, inspired by the kid-requested heavy rotation of the “Pitch Perfect” soundtrack, had decided to latch onto the word “sex” from the Treblemakers’ cover of Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” during the “Riff-Off” medley. Hmm. At this point, I took a quick breath and decided to explain that sex is something between two consenting adults in a committed relationship and how the song is about wanting to TALK about sex before actually DOING anything that would ruin a relationship. Her eyes glazed over and she wandered off, fairly bored and having her sex balloon completely deflated. Score 1 for me?

[Of course, I don’t think that my description of sex is a 100% accurate case; there are plenty of folks who’ve had more than 2 people involved, and “adults” is a bit of a strong term, and “committed” is a state of mind and and and…but I wasn’t in it for accuracy; I was aiming to get her to think it was more than just a game, like “Monopoly Junior”.]

DD has seen movies aplenty before, mostly in the house, and I even screened “Pitch Perfect” for her fairly recently. And sure, the movie has a few mature things in it here and there – but that’s the whole “P” in “PG” – parental guidance. I remember seeing “No Way Out” with my father, on VHS no less, and he sent me out of the room when the infamous limo scene came on. He then called me back out and replayed the scene, explaining that it was a 3 out of 10 in terms of sexual content. Apparently, he was so disappointed in it, he didn’t care that I saw it. I think I found it rather silly back then, and something tells me I’d now find it as laughable as the pool sex scene in “Showgirls”.

Of course, this SEX thing happened in the same week where I took ds to his first movie in the theater. He’s seen movies before, at home, but this was the first time I was taking him outside of our four walls in order to catch a flick. He was excited about the prospect of seeing “Planes” (TALKING CARS AND TALKING PLANES, MOMMY!!!), so I took both of the kids for a show. While he was fine during the movie, I wasn’t even sure that he would make it that far: he lost his nut during the trailers. The very first trailer was for “Free Birds”, an animated feature about a pair of turkeys that try to go back in time to the very first Thanksgiving to get turkey taken “off the menu”.

There’s a scene in the trailer where the more militant turkey (voiced by Woody Harrelson) is squaring off against the happy-go-lucky turkey pardoned by the President for Thanksgiving (voiced by Owen Wilson). When Wilson’s turkey draws a line in the dirt and says not to cross it, Harrelson’s turkey slaps him. Repeatedly. It’s a funny scene, for adults, and dd seemed to enjoy it. DS saw the first slap and IMMEDIATELY turned on the waterworks. He just lost it completely.

I pulled him onto my seat and immediately started cuddling with him, kissing him, stroking his hair, and generally trying all of the tricks that one uses when trying to calm your child. I was really grateful that we were in a fairly empty matinée attended only by people with similarly-aged children; I’m sure that the other parents heard ds and thought, “There but for the grace of God go I…”, much as I do whenever I’m the one with the well-behaved kid, hearing some other kid completely losing it.

And so this all makes me wonder: what age IS the right age to introduce these things? Cartoonish violence, like that of the “Free Bird” trailer, seems perfectly acceptable to me, but I was raised on “Looney Tunes” cartoons. ACME anvils, Wile E. Coyote’s thousand-foot drops into canyons, and point-blank rifle explosions into Elmer Fudd’s face were the norm. None of it was considered real. Wait 15 minutes, and another cartoon will come on showing the same character, back exactly as they were before whatever befell them in the prior cartoon. As much as I love “Marvel’s The Avengers”, I’m absolutely not ready to show that to my kids because the violence is way too much. And the profanity and references to sex in “Pitch Perfect” went blissfully high over dd’s head (or were edited out/explained by me, so as to gloss over them).

Given the dearth of G-rated films in the movie houses these days, I feel like I’m backed into a corner to either live on a steady diet of DVDs or take them to/show them movies that are in the PG range…and ds’ sensitivity may preclude a lot of his viewings. Trying to get a sense of whether it was just that movie or all violence in general, I did play about an hour of “Looney Tunes” for the kids this past weekend, and both kids saw Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Gossamer and Marvin the Martian in some of their most famous pieces. Both laughed. There was no crying whatsoever.

So, maybe it was just that trailer. Or, maybe it was that ds was extra-sensitive from being hungry, since he hadn’t yet really plowed into his food at that point. Or, maybe still, part of what we need to do – much as my dad did for me with that lukewarm sex scene in “No Way Out” – is pick what we think is good enough for acclimating them to the stuff gradually, so they will eventually make their way to the harder stuff they’ll really want to see in later years. I can’t figure what the perfect approach is, but for now I’ll just labor under the impression that letting them pick the pace at which they “progress” up the ratings scale will probably work far better…and just help them along the way as I can. Honestly, I’m not sure what else I can – or should – do, when faced with so few new feature options that are free of sex and violence.

And yes, I know that Bambi’s mother got shot in, like, the first 10 minutes of that movie, and Scar is a scary lion, and Maleficent is a scary witch and…OMG NOTHING IS SAFE. Oh just forget it. I think I’ll just put “CARS” on repeat. Don’t mind me.

A week on the road with the kids

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We spent all of last week on my home turf: the DC area. We decided to get ourselves away for a less-expensive vacation than House of Mouse, and the original plan was halfsies in Sesame Place and halfsies in DC. When it turned out that I couldn’t even stomach the price of 3 nights of hotel + 2 days admission at Sesame Place, we decided to go all-in for DC and just give ourselves more time to visit with friends, more flexibility in scheduling what we’d do, etc.

Before I get into this, let me give a BIG shout-out to KidFriendly DC, which had some fantastic ideas about where to go, what to do, etc. I haven’t lived in the DC area full-time in 16 years, and even with trips home no less than once a year, I don’t know all the latest-and-greatest places to take kiddos. So, big thanks to a blog that’s really well done and very helpful.

As we did in prior trips, this was a driving trip, and I’ll say only that I learned three very important things on our drives down and back:

  1. NEVER travel on a Sunday in the summertime,
  2. Google Maps has another color that’s for traffic worse than bright red and, if you see it, time to start looking for an alternate route, and
  3. I want to give sloppy tongue-kisses to whoever it was that designed the DVD player in the backseat of our SUV.

Seriously, for someone who (pre-kids) thought, “I’ll never need a DVD player in the back of MY CAR”, I’ve come over to the not-so-dark-side in relatively short order. That stuff is genius. DD appears to have inherited at least some portion of dh’s carsickness, so she can’t read in a car or focus on things in her lap for too long without getting ill. The DVD screen, however, works fine for her and she can watch it for a good long stretch with NO negative side-effects. Sure, her brain’s probably rotting out the side of her head for watching so much TV but…did I mention that we were on vacation?

Anyhoo, we did our usual thing of staying at a suite hotel that’s near a Metro stop. When the kids were younger, having a kitchen with a sink for washing dishes and a fridge for storing milk was key. These days, it’s less important, but it’s definitely a nice thing to have: you can fill up the pitcher with water and just pull cold water for your water bottles first thing in the AM. A full breakfast is included in our room price, so we had fantastic breakfast choices every morning – something for everybody. Getting a one-bedroom suite is also the standard for us, since it allows us to put the kids to bed in the evening and then adjourn to the living room to chill out, watch TV, read, etc. before we retire to bed – all without disturbing the sleeping kidlets.

The kids got plenty of exposure to many of the kid-friendly places in DC: Smithsonian institutions like the National Museum of Natural History, the National Air & Space Museum, and the National Zoo, plus the National Building Museum, the National Aquarium (in Baltimore, MD), the B&O Railroad Museum (also in Baltimore) and a bunch of neighborhood playgrounds. Staying in the close-in MD suburbs also gave us great access to really good restaurants (like Redwood, in Bethesda, MD) and places that are MUST-EAT-ATs, like Tastee Diner (we went to Bethesda for that, as well). I was overjoyed – and totally unsurprised – that the meal the kids ate best was as the Tastee. I’m not sure how many late night and weekend breakfasts I had there when I was still a local…let’s say many.

Eating out was something we were dreading, since the kids don’t typically do well at eating out in a one-off situation, much less for about 21 consecutive meals. So, we devised a scheme to tackle this: a rewards system. We told the kids we’d give each of them a single point for trying a bite of something new to them, and we’d give them 5 points for eating an entire serving (or whatever we carved out as what we wanted them to eat). Every 10 points could be cashed in for screen time on dh’s iPad or my iPhone. The hope was that they wouldn’t exist solely on chicken fingers, pizza, and burgers for the entire week. And it worked…somewhat.

DD turned out to be the more adventurous of the two (which is a bit of a reverse from the usual), but that was mainly because she was all about the points. (Her common response to my offer of a food or drink: “Will I get a point?”) I think if I’d asked her to eat fried worms, she would’ve done it to get the point. DS was less into it, but he still tried a few foods here and there. The big surprise for us was that we all liked baby cactus (included in a light salad offered by Oyamel, in downtown DC), especially dd. We all agreed that the baby cactus pieces tasted just like pea pods, and she gobbled up the serving dh gave her and proudly told everyone throughout the rest of the trip, “I ate baby cactus!” She also discovered that she likes some cheeseburgers. (Now, I could’ve told her that, since she’s finished off my cheeseburgers before…but I was trying to encourage the girl to branch out, and I wasn’t about to burst her bubble at this point.)

All in all, it was a nice week away…the kids got plenty of outside time, dh got some workouts in, I got a nice tan, and we got visiting time in with several of my friends who I desperately miss. There’s something very frustrating about not being able to just hop on a plane for a weekend visit like I used to do in the old (read: pre-kid) days, but life’s different now and I mostly accept that.

One of the big benefits, in the end, was also seeing that we could go on the road with each other for a solid week and have everyone come home in one piece. Future trips may be in the car, or may be based on a plane (which would be a whole other new frontier for the kids), but we at least have our routine down for life in a hotel. I’d say it was a big win all around. Now, if only I can scrape together enough cash for that trip to Florida…

Parenting dilemma #347: When to start grounding your kids

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As someone who spent the better portion of my teens in some state of “grounding”, it should come as little surprise that my firstborn would get an early start on things. Yes, at the tender age of 6 (just turned, even!), dd has now experienced her first grounding. It’s not something I planned but, you see, I was at my wit’s end.

Backing thing up a little…

A few weeks back, dh went on a work trip out of town for several days. While he was gone, dd was INSISTENT that she needed to sleep in my bed (much as she was steadfast that she couldn’t sleep alone while I was out of town for BlogHer’12 earlier this year), and I – foolishly? – gave in to this request. Now, it’s easy to cluck tongues and remind me that this is only going to lead to bad things, but let me start off by saying: A) I KNOW, and B) it’s awfully easy to say “don’t do it!” when you’re not the one facing the night of lost sleep while shuttling back and forth between bedrooms trying to get her to SHUT UP already. This isn’t to say that I think co-sleeping is a bad thing, no matter what the AAP says. My daughter is six, and it’s unlikely that she’s going to experience negative effects from co-sleeping other than future difficulties breaking the habit and the fact that my bed is higher off the ground than hers (longer way to fall).

This started in the first night dh was gone and continued for the next several nights, while he was away. Naturally, when dh managed to luck into an earlier flight than expected, one that returned just before midnight (so he could sleep in his own bed one night earlier), she planted her feet in full-on rebellion and tried to wheel and deal. She’d be quiet if she could sleep in our bed until dh came home and then he could move her to her bed. Uh, no. *freaks out* She’d be quiet if she could sleep in our bed all night. NO. *freaks out* Head, meet wall. Repeatedly. I can’t fully remember how it all went but I seem to recall that I didn’t get her to stop fussing until about two hours or so after I put her down. Maybe 2-1/2hrs. It’s all a blur.

And then we get fast-forward to this holiday weekend, where it seemed like things were going downhill fast, as the little miss decided on Friday night that she needed to be in our bed. Over the next several hours, it became apparent to both me and dh that she was going to insist on coming into our bed even though both of us just wanted our space. He didn’t feel well thanks to some kind of stomach bug, and I have been fighting a miserable cough for weeks. My initial attempt to get her to sleep was around 7:30pm. We would be fighting this battle with her, on and off, for the next 2-ish hours.

I tried reasoning with her. I tried appealing to her sense of self-preservation (“You don’t want to get {whatever crud it is that we have}!”). Nothing worked. DH tried similar appeals. Both of us even threatened to take away privileges, as a last-ditch effort. Still, nothing worked.

Sure enough, she ended up in our bed around 1:20am.

At that point, I’d already told dh I wanted her grounded, not sure what that would mean much beyond “you’re not allowed out of your room except for potty breaks and meals”. She agreed to be grounded in exchange for sleeping in our bed, to which dh responded, incredulous: “I’ve never heard of anyone asking to be grounded before!” I suppose it’s also easy to be incredulous at 1:20am. At that time of day, at our age, any activity is surprising.

So, Saturday morning began the DAY OF THE GROUNDING. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t come with me on a trip to Kohl’s to buy presents for the kiddo whose Christmas we’re underwriting through an “adopt a child” program. She didn’t get why she couldn’t go out to play. She didn’t understand why she couldn’t linger in the den after a meal was over.

I feel for her, really I do. But having already revoked her privileges to her bike, her scooter and TV for a WEEK over the fuss she put up the night dh was coming home from his trip, I wasn’t sure what I could take away that would have an impact. We’re looking at implementing some kind of system that will be more along the line of positive reinforcement, probably in conjunction with her responsibility chart (using only a handful of items as the responsibilities we’ll track).

There’s a part of me that says that there’s nothing we can do to get a six-year-old to fall in line, but there’s another part of me that’s sure this isn’t true, that there are disciplinary and proactively reinforcing measures that will work. I’m just not sure what they are. I’d prefer not to have to ground her again anytime soon, especially since I’m not really sure that it has any real effect at this age. If anybody has any suggestions – short of corporal punishment, which I’m desperately trying to avoid – I’d love to know. What has worked for you with your kiddos, ’round about that 6yr age range?