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To Elf or Not to Elf

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

The “Elf on the Shelf” first entered my consciousness a few years ago, when my oldest daughter came home from a clearly hip-and-ahead-of-the-curve friend’s house after Thanksgiving and declared that the family had an elf.

The slave-elf Dobby from the “Harry Potter” books sprang to mind, but that wasn’t it. As you surely now know, what that family possessed was an “Elf on the Shelf,” who observed the two children of the house and reported back to Santa. The said elf possessed powers allowing him to move around the house while no one was looking, and reminded me of the Weeping Angels of “Doctor Who” fame (they can move only when no one is watching, and sneak up on victims to transport them to the past). But like so many children, my daughter’s friends were unconcerned and delighted by the elf’s antics (the word “antics” is part of the mandatory write-about-the-Elf-on-the-Shelf vocabulary).

I thought the elf was a clever relic of one of the parents in the family’s childhood, but as you also surely know by now, it’s not. It’s a commercial item, available in a store near you, and it’s everywhere: in the Thanksgiving Day Parade, in a digitally animated holiday special and in millions of bloggers’ homes across the country. Those elf antics make great fodder, and they also make great fodder for snark regarding the “Overachieving Elf on the Shelf Mommies” from bloggers like the anonymous writer of People I Want to Punch in the Throat (her hilarious post from last year was reprinted this year on The Huffington Post, in honor of her book, “Spending the Holidays with People I Want to Punch in the Throat”).

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Research: Parents Less Likely to Die Young

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

From the annals of Research Studies We Appreciate, Even Though We Aren’t Quite Sure What to Do With the Information, via The Atlantic: being a parent means you’re less likely to die before your time.

This piece of information comes courtesy of a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health — a “natural experiment,” meaning that the authors analyzed data created by people in the wild, rather than by dividing them into research groups in the lab. They examined 21,276 couples undergoing IVF treatment for intertility over a 14-year period, and found that, for reasons that remain confounding, both women and men who remained childless had a greater chance of dying prematurely (through circulatory disease, cancers or accidents) than those who either had children biologically or adopted.

There you go. And there’s no need to add caveats or point out that correlation is not causation — the researchers have very kindly already done all of those things. Could the real association be between longevity and the things that make you more likely to be a parent, like good health (adoptive parents are evaluated for their health before being permitted to adopt)? It could. Could the likelihood of premature death be increased by the difficulties of desiring children (given that the data came from people in infertility treatment) and then ultimately not having them? It could! They just don’t know. “Mindful that association is not causation,” they write, “our results suggest that the mortality rates are higher in the childless.”

For parents, it’s the encouraging news of the day.

Too Much Stuff Last Year

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

On Dec. 1, I received, by e-mail, a message from myself — a calendar alert: “too much stuff last year.”

That’s it. I did not, apparently, feel the need to expand on my words, but I can guess when I sent them — last Dec. 25. The adorable pictures of my pajama-clad children in front of the tree before opening gifts on Christmas morning also reveal piles of wrapped gifts behind them, gifts that took us all morning to open. Too many gifts. Too many to appreciate and too many to enjoy. Days later, books and games that would have been embraced with excitement at any other time sat untouched.

Piles of gifts under the Christmas tree are a tradition in my family, and many others. Some families give eight gifts of increasing magnitude for Hanukkah (which we celebrate with a family activity or game every night). But what’s in the boxes has changed. Things that once came as gifts, like clothes, new shoes or sports equipment, have become “needs” that we fill at any time. We want the children to read, so we don’t make them wait for the next book in a favorite series. We want them to exercise, so bikes of the right size don’t appear under the tree in snowy December — they arrive or are handed down as a matter of course every spring. When I was 6, my gifts would have included only a few “things to play with.” Now, my own children (who are 6, 7, 8 and 11)  very rarely unwrap anything else.

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Should Teenagers Be Given Prescriptions for Emergency Contraception?

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

The American Academy of Pediatrics has long recommended that pediatricians talk to their teenage patients about sex and contraception — and now it recommends that doctors send their teenage patients home with a prescription for emergency contraception as well. “Adolescents are more likely to use emergency contraception if it has been prescribed in advance of need,” the organization’s Committee on Adolescence says in a policy statement.

Emergency contraception is already available in some New York City schools without parental permission. The pills (also called morning-after pills or Plan B) are available without prescription to women over 17 years old in most states, although earlier this year, researchers found that as many as one in five teenagers were incorrectly informed by pharmacists, by phone, that they could not provide morning-after pills to 17-year-olds.

But providing teenagers increased access to emergency contraception is (of course) controversial, as the New York Times reporter Roni Caryn Rabin describes in her Consumer column, Teenagers and the Morning-After Pill. While the American Academy of Pediatrics and other organizations cite research showing that teenagers are poorly informed about emergency contraception and were more likely to use the drug after unprotected sex or a failure of birth control than those who had to seek it out after the fact, organizations opposed to easy access point to research showing that teenagers with a prescription were more likely to be careless about birth control or have unprotected sex. She also describes concerns about the drugs’ effectiveness, although not about their safety.

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Are Dads the Ones Who Buy Lego?

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA
Lego Friends in action. Lego Friends in action.

Lest you were tired of talking about Lego Friends or gender-specific toys, the Business section has published an article explaining one reason why Lego and now Mega Bloks (which will  introduce  a Barbie Build ‘n Style line next week) are producing girl-targeted construction toys:

“Dad is a bigger influencer in terms of toy purchases over all, and this sets up well for that, because the construction category is something Dad grew up with and definitely has strong feelings and emotions about,” said Vic Bertrand, chief innovation officer of Mega Brands, Mega Bloks’ parent company.

Oh yes. Dad. Wouldn’t want him to be all ashamed by putting a doll in his cart.

“Once it’s in the home, dads would very much be able to join in this play that otherwise they might feel is not their territory,” Dr. Maureen O’Brien, a psychologist who consulted on the new Barbie set, told the Times reporter Stephanie Clifford. Of course, fathers aren’t the only parents who are more excited to build a Lego set or block tower than join a doll tea party (or, for that matter, push Thomas around the track). Some kinds of play just lend themselves more to the whole “fun for all ages” thing. But if it takes an assumption that building bricks will get those manly men shopping to persuade companies to offer building toys that make my daughter feel welcome in the Lego world, I for one will accept it.

Still, if you want to persuade me to play with you this afternoon, Lego will get you a whole lot farther than a pink tea set.

Kate Middleton’s Morning Sickness: How Bad Can It Get?

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

An entire world watching. Morning sickness so bad it requires a trip to the hospital. Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, has embarked on a version of pregnancy that few would envy.

Hyperemesis gravidarum, the condition that palace officials said led to her hospitalization, is morning sickness at its worst (or the worst I’m aware of): a condition so severe no food or liquid can be kept down. It was one of the conditions at the heart of one of Atul Gawande’s early New Yorker pieces, in 1999: A Queasy Feeling — an article Stephanie Lucianovic described, via Twitter, as “the article that made me terrified to get pregnant.” In it, Dr. Gawande lays out the experience of Amy Fitzpatrick:

Fitzpatrick continually felt that she was on the verge of throwing up. She had been someone who could eat almost anything; now the smell of the blandest foods made her gag. She had always loved stomach-churning amusement-park rides; now riding in a car or just standing up or tilting her head brought on severe morning sickness. She couldn’t make it down the stairs. Even in bed, watching TV or focusing on a magazine made her head reel. Over the next couple of weeks, she would vomit five or six times daily.

What was different and “terrifying” about Ms. Fitzpatrick’s condition is that it didn’t get better after the four-month mark. According to the American Pregnancy Association’s Web site, up to 20 percent of women require care for hyperemesis throughout their pregnancy.

The Duchess of Cambridge’s pregnancy was bound to provoke interest (and I realize that’s an understatement), but her illness has even those of us who would otherwise be relatively indifferent wincing in sympathy. Overwhelming, debilitating nausea during pregnancy is bad enough. Overwhelming, debilitating nausea in a world with cameras following your every move is unthinkable. Overwhelming, debilitating nausea when, in some antiquated sense, pregnancy is perhaps your main purpose as a public figure? It may be the quintessential first-world problem, but it sounds pretty awful just the same.

The subject of “A Queasy Feeling,” Amy Fitzpatrick, gave birth (to twins), vomited once more and then completely enjoyed her first meal in months: a giant hamburger with blue cheese and fries.

There’s no word on whether she ever got pregnant again.

Would — or did — you?

Don’t Encourage Students to Skip College

By RICK WARTZMAN and RANDYE HODER

Kobe Bryant and LeBron James didn’t go to college at all. Carmelo Anthony attended Syracuse University, but for only a year. All three are now superstars in the N.B.A., earning tens of millions of dollars. So does this mean that we should encourage our 14-year-old hoops-loving son to take a shot at a similar path and see if he can make it as a professional basketball player?

Of course not. We’d be incredibly irresponsible, if not utterly delusional, if we suggested to him that this was a smart move.

Yet more and more college-aged children may well be tempted to try the business-world equivalent of an N.B.A. pipe dream, looking to become the next Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg — all of whom found fame and fortune without a college diploma. The “who needs a degree?” chorus is getting louder and louder, as illustrated by a provocative piece in Sunday’s New York Times that features artwork depicting four young people whose sweatshirts spell out “College Is for Suckers.”

“Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated to ‘hacking’ higher education,” the article notes. “Inspired by billionaire role models . . . they consider themselves a D.I.Y. vanguard, committed to changing the perception of dropping out from a personal failure to a sensible option, at least for a certain breed of risk-embracing maverick.”

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Poor Women and Children Faced With Fiscal Threat

By BRYCE COVERT

As negotiating and posturing over the looming “fiscal cliff” continues, one phrase we hear less often than we should is “nondefense discretionary spending.” A boring string of words if ever there was one, it’s a category of spending that will play a role whether we go off the cliff or if we avoid it with a grand bargain, since it stands to see drastic cuts either way. Those abstract, boring words represent very concrete assistance to women and children living in poverty. A significant reduction in governmental spending in that opaquely named category will disproportionately affect programs they rely on.

If nothing is done and we go over the fiscal cliff, sequestration kicks in – automatic spending cuts that resulted from Congress’s failure to reach a deficit reduction deal last year. Sequestration calls for $1.2 trillion in cuts evenly split between defense and nondefense spending over the next decade. But $109 billion of that will hit in fiscal year 2013, gouging a $55 billion hole in the nondefense side. That will amount to an 8.2 percent reduction in nondefense discretionary spending.

If we don’t go over the cliff, any grand bargain to avoid it will most likely have similar cuts. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says sequestration is “best thought of as the first stage of deficit-reduction action that is likely to consist of several measures enacted over several years.” President Obama’s recent starting bid in the negotiations includes the sequestration cuts. The Fix the Debt campaign’s CEO Fiscal Leadership Council recommends a deal that wants to “cut low-priority spending.” This category of spending is particularly easy for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to hack at because, as David Kamin explained in The Washington Post, “cutting it is as simple as changing numbers on a spreadsheet.” You have to get a lot more specific in other areas of the budget.

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Mother of the Year

By RANDYE HODER

Years ago, my friend Mindy’s sixth-grade daughter, Sophie, called from school demanding to know where she was: “I’m at work,” Mindy told her. “Where else would I be?”

“At my awards ceremony?” Sophie suggested. Oops.

That night when Mindy arrived home, Sophie had a pseudo trophy of her own waiting for her mom: Mother of the Year.

Ever since then, whenever Mindy does anything her family thinks is, well, less than motherly (trust me, the list is long) they joke that it’s time to bring out and polish her Mother of the Year trophy.

Occasionally I try to commiserate with Mindy, telling her some story or another about one of my own awful mommy moments. But no matter what I’ve done, she always insists that I’m not in her league. After all, she is the mom who used to put her children to bed fully clothed so she wouldn’t have to get them dressed for school in the morning when time was tight. And it was Mindy who told the school nurse that she would not come to pick up her son Jake unless someone actually saw him throw up. Well, you get the idea.

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‘Worst Toy Awards’ Target Lego Friends

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

The Lego Friends line may promote gender stereotyping. It may be an unnecessary segmenting off of would-be girl Lego builders into “girly” Legos and away from more basic brick sets that offer the complex challenges of creating your own models and worlds (although no more so than any branded Lego kit, all of which are too limiting in the eyes of many Lego fans). It might have provoked all sorts of debate, here and elsewhere when it was introduced, over whether the sets (designed for more role play and storytelling) exploit girls’ natural play patterns or embrace them.

But a contender for Worst Toy of the Year? Hardly. Yet it, along with two objects designed to turn smartphones into balls and stuffed animals, an app that allows a parent to insert a child’s image into a digital storybook, and a Slurpee maker, has been nominated by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood as a candidate for its TOADY (Toys Oppressive and Destructive to Young Children) Award.

The TOADY awards are usually an amusing coda to the C.C.F.C.’s year of laudable efforts to curtail the astonishing quantity of marketing our children are exposed to on a daily basis. Last year, I missed the small voting window (voting is open this year until Dec. 6) but wrote that I would have supported the microphone that transformed a child’s voice into that of T-Pain (a rapper known for his misogynistic odes to mood-altering substances) over the ultimate victor, a tablet computer for babies. The award in 2010 went to Addicting Games, a Nickelodeon site that featured graphically violent and oddly sexualized games and which appeared, at the time, in highly clickable and intriguing ads on the NickJr. Web site.

But nominating Lego Friends for its gender stereotyping calls into question the premise of the TOADY. Read more…

Do Gender-Neutral Gifts Still Elude Parents?

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA
You could find this scene playing out at our house right now. You could find this scene playing out at our house right now.

It may be the 40th anniversary of “Free to Be You and Me,” featuring the song “William’s Doll,” but the decision of a Swedish toy company, Top Toy (a licensee of Toys “R” Us), to put blow-dryers and dolls in the hands of its boy models and feature photos of Nerf-gun-wielding girls is still able to generate headlines. “This holiday season, how about a toy gun for the girl on your shopping list, and a doll for the boy?” a writer at The Wall Street Journal asks. “Dolls for Billy, toy guns for Sally?” The Toronto Star demands.

The interest that the images of boys with toy irons and girls with action figures has generated should be more surprising than the images themselves. Haven’t we settled that making assumptions about which playthings will interest which sex is for out-of-touch bastions of the old school? I’m not sure I would have even noticed Top Toy’s apparently gender-bending pictures if the catalog had arrived, in English, in my mailbox. But then I’m in the HearthSong demographic, and pictures of boys dancing with scarves and girls building with blocks are scattered throughout that catalog’s pages.

A typical image from the HearthSong catalog. A typical image from the HearthSong catalog.

The gender-typing of toys and toy advertising may remain strong in some places — stronger, I suspect, than the gender-stereotyping you’d find in most preschools or playrooms, no matter how traditional the area — but the modern, educated parent (she wrote, with her tongue firmly in cheek) counteracts that by keeping purchases and gifts gender neutral.

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Parenthood and the New York Times Notable Books List

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

I possess three of the books on the list, in hard copy, with intent to read.1 Another I read excerpted in so many places that I didn’t feel as if I needed to read the actual book.2 One is on my Kindle app, but honesty requires that I admit that I am never, ever going to finish it.3 I’m partway through two more and uncertain if and when I will go on (which probably means I won’t).4 There are seven more on my to-read list.5 Another I bought, tried, then set aside after a few chapters.6

Which means that of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2012, I have read, in their entirety, exactly zero.

I read a lot less since I had children. Or maybe since I grew up and found myself with a job and other obligations, or maybe since the advent of all the many, many distractions and must-reads available on my desktop, laptop and iPad.

Where once I gobbled a book nearly every day, reading while in line for concerts and college basketball games, reading and missing all the scenery on cross-country car and train trips, and taking every opportunity to pick up a book, now I read a little every night, a little some evenings in the intervals of helping children with homework and making dinner, a little when I can sit down on the weekend, and a lot on every plane ride or vacation — nearly the only moments when travel time isn’t also work time for me. All of which means I just don’t rack up the books the way I once did.

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How Children Subsidize ‘Low, Low Prices’

By KJ DELL'ANTONIA

A significant part of our national antipoverty strategy over the past few decades has been increasing employment — moving people, particularly mothers, off “welfare rolls” and into jobs. But the types of jobs available to most lower-income parents, mothers and fathers alike, are low-wage jobs that present their own problems to those trying to  support and raise a family. The lack of benefits, the inflexible hours and the often nonstandard shifts exacerbate the low pay and create a situation in which parents don’t have the time they want and need to spend with their children or the money to find high-quality substitutes (like activities and child care) for that time.

The result, according to the Boston College sociologist Lisa Dodson and Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, is that their parents’ low-wage jobs put youth at risk. Adolescents from households headed by a low-income worker are more likely to drop out of school, to be obese and to take on adult roles too young. In providing child care for siblings and forgoing opportunities that require an engaged parent helping with homework or encouraging outside activities, teenage children in low-wage families are, Drs. Dodson and Albelda argue, “effectively subsidizing” their parents’ employment as home health aides, janitors, food-service providers and retail clerks.

That can’t be what we hoped to achieve with welfare reform. “Policymakers tend to put things into what we call ‘silos,’” Dr. Dodson said. “Jobs here. Kids there. Instead, we need to look at the ways these things affect each other. The structure of low-wage jobs creates a particular kind of obstacle for parents trying to take good care of their kids.” And children thrust into their own care-giving roles are children who aren’t easily able to develop the skills they need to do better than a low-wage job for themselves as adults. The low-wage job cycle becomes a vicious one.

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‘Far From the Tree’ and the Literature of Autism

By JOEL YANOFSKY

On a recent road trip, my son, Jonah, and I outvoted my wife, Cynthia, winning the right to listen to Steely Dan’s “Greatest Hits.” This provided Cynthia with time to fashion a pointed critique of the songs Jonah and I were happily singing along to.

“This music’s slick and vacuous,” she pronounced during “Dr. Wu.”

“Exactly,” I said. “We’re guys. We love ‘slick and vacuous.’”

These days, I’m drawn to anything my son and I can enjoy together. He’s about to turn 14 and has autism – two factors that increase, exponentially, the ways in which his brain works differently than mine.

Down deep, we all expect our kids to be a chip off the old block, an expectation most parents will have sufficient time to give up gracefully. The word reproduction is “at best a euphemism,” as Andrew Solomon says in his new book, “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity.” A euphemism intended “to comfort prospective parents before they get in over their heads.”

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Haunted by ‘The Lonely Doll’

By GRETCHEN RUBIN

Then one morning Edith looked into the garden and there stood two bears!

The big bear bowed. “You must be Edith,” he said. “I am Mr. Bear and this is Little Bear.” – Dare Wright, “The Lonely Doll”

As a child, I was fascinated by the beautiful, eerie world of Dare Wright. I loved her books (like “The Lonely Doll,” “A Gift From the Lonely Doll” and “Edith and Mr. Bear”) and the uneasy feeling they gave me.

I pored over the pictures. In whose house did Edith and the bears live? Who was the unseen woman who had the pumps, the jewelry, the lipstick that tempted Edith and Little Bear into mischief? How did the bears know to come to Edith?

When I picked up these books again as an adult, to read them to my daughters, I developed a mini-obsession with Dare Wright. I read Jean Nathan’s fascinating biography, “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright” (and learned that for many years, Ms. Wright lived just down the street from my apartment). I ordered copies of her picture books; many are out of print, and shockingly expensive. Just the words “The Lonely Doll” sent a shiver down my spine as a child, I get a chill as an adult from titles like “The Little One,” “Take Me Home” and “Make Me Real.”

Why do I love her books so much? One of my chief intellectual interests is a subject that I call “symbols beyond words”:  Virginia Woolf, Elias Canetti, Flannery O’Connor, J. M. Barrie, Carl Jung, Christopher Alexander, Stephanie Meyer, the movie “The Piano,” the art of Joseph Cornell, the spiritual memoir of St. Therese of Lisieux, the plays of ancient Greece and Shakespeare. These make use of symbols that penetrate very deeply into human nature, beyond what words and correspondences can explain.

Some picture books also give me the feeling of “symbols beyond words.” Maurice Sendak (particularly “Where the Wild Things Are”), Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon,” Sandra Boynton’s “Going to Bed Book,” and everything created by Dare Wright.

Do any picture-book illustrations,  full of uncanny meanings, haunt your imagination?