"Parents' Guide to the Middle School Years" by Joe Bruzzese
In honor of the upcoming 1st anniversary of the launch of our podcast series Family Confidential we remastered the first two podcasts to improve the sound quality. We’ve learned a lot in the past year about how to produce great podcasts. We must be doing something right because we’ve had close to 18,000 downloads of these puppies.
So… for your listening enjoyment, here’s Podcast #01: The Gift of Confidence (redux)
**********
We all want our kids to succeed and grow up up to be confident, resilient, thoughtful young adults who can competently manage their own lives. But sometimes what we say we want is at odds with our parenting choices. Boy is it ever! Especially when it comes to doing what’s really necessary to help our children develop independence. Like when we say: “Your homework is your responsibility” and then spend the entire afternoon and evening nagging: “Do you have a lot of homework?” “How much do you have?” “I thought you were working on your homework!” “Did you finish your homework?” “Let me check your homework.” Auugggh! Not only will all this micro-managing create loads of tension, it’s also doing nothing to encourage self-confidence in your child.
Subscribe to Family Confidential and tune in each time!
*What’s a podcast? “A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually either digital audio or video, that is made available for download via web syndication.” – Wikipedia… So, in this case, there’s an audio file for you to listen to (in addition to reading the above).
"So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and How Parents Can Protect Their Kids" by Diane E Levin, Ph.D.
Little girls have dreamed of being princesses as long as there have been fairy tales. Thanks to Hans Christian Anderson, I myself had a slightly off-kilter fantasy of growing up to be a mermaid. But if I wanted to dress up as a mermaid for Halloween or to paddle around in my friend’s plastic pool I needed to create my own tail, so to speak. Like all former kids who are now today’s parents, my fantasies came directly from my own imagination… evolving naturally from my interests and taking me into realms I chose to explore through play.
But for 21st century kids, kids who live and breathe packaged princesses, Bratz dolls and Transformers, things are very different when it comes to what they play with, how they play and what they wear.
If you’ve got a daughter who can walk and talk you’ve likely had at least a few conversations and some strong disagreements about her choice of clothes. There’s nothing new about any of this. It’s the job of every generation to attempt to scandalize their parents. We did it to our parents and we didn’t turn out so bad.
But pop culture is way more extreme now and something very destructive is being foisted on our kids via TV shows, movies, print and media ads and on the racks in children’s clothing stores. For one thing, styles for girls of all ages are moving in a very dangerous direction. So much of what’s sold is too short, too tight, too low cut, too peek a boo, too… sexy for little girls. Yet there it all is. And they want these styles. Man, do they want them! Because their friends wear them and because too many little girls, tweens and teens truly believe that their value as people is a direct function of how they look.
It gets harder and harder for parents to carry out our prime objectives: keeping our kids safe and raising them to be compassionate, thoughtful, self-assured young adults. But the issue goes way beyond short shorts, crop tops and G-strings marketed for tweens. Beyond TV shows and toys that program girls and boys to think and act and play and dream in the narrowest, most gender-specific ways.
What’s going on here in 21st Century America is a war of values. On one side, parents doing their best to raise healthy young adults. And what are we up against? The marketing might of multi-billion dollar corporations. You probably don’t need anyone to tell you who’s winning.
*What’s a podcast? “A podcast is a series of digital media files, usually either digital audio or video, that is made available for download via web syndication.” –Wikipedia… So, in this case, there’s an audio file for you to listen to (in addition to reading the above).
