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Parenting Press®Welcome to the September 2011
“News for Parents”
Dear Friends of Parenting Press:
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Looking for a conference speaker? Check our list of authors available for speeches and interviews, and the online media kits. Books, info sheets, teaching plans, kids’ activities: we’re always in a whirl at Parenting Press with dozens of ideas that we hope you’ll enjoy and find helpful. Many are described in this issue; others will be published in later issues (see Coming Attractions).
IN THIS ISSUE
- WHAT’S NEW?
- FEATURES
- POTPOURRI
- COMING ATTRACTIONS
- Costumes! Quick, Easy and Even No-Sew!
- Trick or Treat for Your Food Bank
I. WHAT’S NEW?
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Celebrate Author Roald Dahl
Tuesday, Sept. 13 is the anniversary of the writer Roald Dahl’s birth—the ideal day to read parts of his stories aloud, and maybe even snivel around the house as some of his villains did! You’ll find all sorts of information about Dahl and his books and stories at the author’s official web site. This extremely well-designed site shows characters from his books racing across your screen and even a sketch of Dahl, his head bobbing, eyes twinkling and eyebrows raising. Besides reading about such favorite characters as Willy Wonka, consider Danny the Champion of the World, about a boy being raised by his father in a camp trailer, or Dirty Beasts, a picture book with comic verse about nasty critters. About one crocodile Dahl wrote, “On Saturdays he likes to crunch/Six juicy children for his lunch. . .”
You can send e-cards through the site, play games, see pictures of the author as a boy, read a little about his life, and moms and dads can learn about the humorous books he wrote for adults, too! Want more? Click on through to the web site for the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre. It will tell you more about the very special event on Sept. 28, when Dahl illustrator Quentin Blake is scheduled to be online.
By the way, Blake has a wonderful web site, too! An illustrator for more than 50 years, he’s done about 300 books. Many are shown at www.quentinblake.com. Today you can also find his drawings on fabric, wallpaper, ceramics and greeting cards.
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Cut Costs and Calories with Home-Cooking
Concerned about your food budget? About obesity? About nutrition? Then cut out most trips to restaurants, both drive-through and sit-down style. And banish Coke, Mountain Dew, and juice-flavored sweet drinks from your own kitchen.
That’s the advice of several experts, including Mollie Katzen, the Berkeley-based author of the Moosewood Cookbook and 14 other cookbooks, which in total have sold more than six million copies.
In the article “Restaurants Rampant,” which appeared in the July-August issue of Harvard Magazine, Katzen points out that too many American restaurant meals are built around “a six- or eight-ounce hunk of animal protein in the center of the plate and some token vegetables.”
By contrast, she says, “I want a maximum of three ounces of meat or fish and at least 80 percent of my meal to be plant foods” and less salt. “Insecure chefs salt up the food. . .”
Katzen goes on to point out that in general, it is “incredibly economical” to prepare your own meals: “You can spend $1.50 to make your own sandwich, or buy one for $10. It’s easy to spend a couple thousand dollars a year on lunch sandwiches!”
The exception: fast food. “Restaurants Rampant” notes that the economies of scale and efficiencies of mass production mean that you cannot cook more cheaply than a McDonald’s. This article quotes John Willoughby, currently executive editor at Boston Common Press, publishers of “Cook’s Illustrated,” who says fast food is “definitely easier, probably cheaper, and unfortunately a kind of food that many have gotten used to eating. There are studies now showing that if you eat a constant diet of fast food, you get addicted to the high fat and sugar content of it, just as if it were a drug—so food without that content doesn’t satisfy you.”
The article goes on, “One reason KFC can undersell the home cook is that the basic ingredients of unhealthy food are incredibly cheap. White starch and sugar cost next to nothing. So you can make huge serving sizes—30-ounce sodas, for example—and people think they’re getting value.” These large portions are also almost always high in calories.
It concludes, “The current American epidemic of obesity (its prevalence has doubled since 1980) owes much to large portions—especially sweet, liquid ones.” It quotes Walter Willett, who chairs the Department of Nutrition in the Harvard School of Public Health as saying, “Sugared beverages are the single most important source of needless calories in the U.S. diet. If you could get rid of those, almost half of the obesity epidemic would disappear.”
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Eating Together Helps Prevent Problems in Kids and Teens
Besides getting pop machines out of schools, getting kids out to recess and to gym class and turning off television and computer screens, there’s another solution to the issues of obesity and poor nutrition. And, as a recent article in Pediatrics, points out, this may be easy.
“Sit down and eat together as a family” is the advice in “Is Frequency of Shared Family Meals Related to the Nutritional Health of Children and Adolescents,” written by Amber J. Hammons and Barbara H. Fiese, and published in the June 2011 issue of the American Academy of Pediatrics journal.
Kids who eat with their families at least three times a week are:
- More likely to have normal weight
- More likely to have healthier diets and eating patterns
- Less likely to have “disordered” eating (for example, binging, purging, fasting, skipping meals and smoking cigarettes as a means of weight control)
Although the authors can only hypothesize about why shared family meals are such a protective factor, they identify several possibilities:
- Eating together means kids are less likely to eat “ready-made dinners,” which are less nutritious
- When families eat together, parents may be more likely to recognize the symptoms of eating disorders and address unhealthy patterns before they become serious problems
- Family meals make “connectedness” more likely, which the authors say may encourage adolescents to discuss eating problems with their parents
Earlier studies have emphasized other benefits of pleasant family mealtimes. If you turn off the television, stick to a mealtime routine and strive for conversation, your children are more likely to:
- Eat fruits and vegetables
- Consume fewer soft drinks and fried foods
- Have higher self-esteem
- Behave better
- Achieve more academically, including developing vocabulary earlier
- Avoid high-risk behaviors in adolescence (including smoking, early sexual activity, violence, and suicide)
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Use BookCrossing to See Who Reads YOUR Books
When you borrow books from the library, you can’t tell who read them before you, or who reads them after you. Same with books you donate to a book sale or reading room: you have no idea who else enjoys them. If you’d like to share books, and be connected with others who read the same copies, explore BookCrossing.
Based in Sandpoint ID, this free service encourages you to register a book before you pass it on—to a friend, as a donation, by leaving it on an airport bench. As the web site explains, the organization has an online archival and tracking system that allows members to connect with other readers, review literature and track their individual books by marking them with unique BCIDs (BookCrossing Identity Numbers).
Launched in April, BookCrossing already has 950,000 members and more than 8 million books in 132 countries: three dozen in Afghanistan, for example, 34,500 in Australia, and a couple each in the Congo, Cook Islands and Lesotho. You can see how many people are registered in your city or state (more than 13,000 in Washington, and of those, 3,100 are in Seattle, where “News for Parents” is published). Better yet, you can see what these members (identified only by screen name) say about books you’ve liked or books you think you’d like to read.
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Importance of Breast Feeding
More American babies are born in August and September than in any other months of the year, which is one reason that Parenting Press SIDS author Fern R. Hauck has an important message about breast-feeding for new parents.
Dr. Hauck, a family physician in Virginia who is also involved in research on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, recently had a report published in “Pediatrics,” the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. In it she pointed out that besides other known benefits, breast-feeding protects babies from SIDS. For a child who is only breast-fed (that is, receives no formula), the risk of SIDS can be reduced by as much as 70 percent; for a child who is breast-fed and also receives formula, the risk can be reduced by as much as 60 percent. Pacifier use in the first six months of life, after babies learn to breast feed, can also help reduce the risk of SIDS.
What is the link between breast-feeding and protection from SIDS? Breast-fed babies are more easily aroused from sleep between two and three months of age, which is within the period (two to four months) when SIDS is most likely to occur. Babies that have difficulty arousing themselves are considered more vulnerable to SIDS.
“All health professionals should speak in one voice about the importance of breastfeeding, which now adds SIDS reduction to its long list of maternal and infant health benefits,” concludes Hauck’s journal article.
II. FEATURES
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Tips for the month
Each Saturday, Parenting Press posts a new parenting tip and the previous week’s tip is moved to the archive.
Back to school means challenges in many households. From the hundreds of parenting tips that have been published by Parenting Press, here are some classics that can help you short-circuit problems, especially if you’re sharing caregiving or parenting responsibilities with someone with different concerns and values.
September 3 — Successful Co-Parenting
September 10 — Homework Rules and Consequences, Part I
September 17 — Homework Rules and Consequences, Part II
September 24 — The Hidden Benefits of Routines
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Family Fun Ideas — Tuck Me In Talk
Most of us talk to our kids, but how often do we talk with them? The creators of “Tuck Me In Cards,” Taffy Gallagher and Karin Watson, have produced cards with conversation starters to use when you’re tucking a child in—or at any other time during the day. “Appreciate the child’s interests, thoughts, and feelings,” they write. “Talk with them now to help them develop skills for their future.”
Each card has a comment or question, with followup discussion points: “I’ll tell you a story about when I was little,” for example, with, “Describe a favorite toy, event, person, or place from when you were little.” Other conversation starters: “I’ll make an animal sound and you guess what I am” (perfect after a day at the zoo or 4-H fair), “What are you looking forward to tomorrow?” and “Did anything make you laugh today?”
Many readers tell us that they use Janan Cain’s The Way I Feel for “tuck me in talk,” too. Kids can page their way through the book, describing what in the day made them excited, bored or sad. Following Gallagher and Watson’s suggestions, parents can also use The Way I Feel to ask children about what made them proud, or how they handled a time when they felt shy or disappointed.
A third suggestion: sit down with your kids and have them dictate to you the questions they want at bedtime.
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Community Service — Back-to-School Gifts for School!
Our goal with this column is to suggest ways that you can model the concept of sharing and giving back to your community. There are practical advantages to community service, too. Kids can use these projects to meet school or youth group requirements for community service and to start building resumes that they’ll use when applying for first jobs or college.
With budgets tighter than ever in schools, this may be the time to help supply your school or preschool with books and materials. With kids’ skills—and the school schedule—in mind, you, other parents and all of your children can decide whether to run a fund-raiser (the ever-popular bake sale, or perhaps a yard sale of outgrown toys and books) so that you can give your school cash or a bookstore gift certificate. Another option: Ask teachers or the school librarian for a wish list that you can circulate with party invitations, and then ask each guest at your “back-to-school celebration” to bring one of the desired books or school supplies. Part of the celebration fun can be wrapping the gifts and making cards to accompany them!
III. POTPOURRI
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Special of the month — Free Book When You “Like” Us
This special has expired.
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