Have a look at the boxes of toys you've got lined up for Christmas morning.
Wander your playroom and look in the bins at what your kids already have.
How many of today's toys do you think will still be around in 10 years? 20 years? 30 years?
My mother saved a bunch from when I was a kid for Nana's toybox. The Fisher Price town town, airport and circus are classics. Timeless. My boys eat them up when they go there.
The Toy Hall of Fame has inducted 46 toys since it started in 1998.
Barbie, Easy Bake Oven, Checkers, Ball, Playing Cards, Kite, Lego, Teddy Bear and Marbles are all in the hall.
No Tickle Me Elmo. No Transformers.
The 2011 Toy Hall of Fame inductees included blanket, dollhouse and Hot Wheels.
Geekdad recently came up with a list of the Top 5 Toys of All Time.
5. Dirt
4. Cardboard Tube
3. String
2. Box
1. Stick
While you're flipping through the Toys R Us catalogue and going over your child's wish list, think about this: when armed with imagination, a child is unstoppable.
It inevitably happens immediately after we introduce our son to someone new.
"This is Zacharie," we say.
"Hey, Zach! Give me five!" they immediately respond.
I'm sure we're not the only ones who cringe at the shortening of our son's name by someone trying to sound friendly and hip with our son. We introduce him as Zacharie, we identify his name as Zacharie and it becomes Zach. It's nails on a chalkboard for my wife.
If you named your son Benjamin or your daughter Jennifer, you know the pain. My wife and I spent weeks negotiating the name and the one we settled on was not Zach. It's Zacharie.
Things are different for number 2 though. His birth certificate says Charles, yet we call him Charlie. I insisted on Charles for the official name so it would fulfill my wish to have children with French names, my wife insisted on calling him Charlie because that's the name she likes. It's our compromise and we introduce him as Charlie.
Sure, there are other nicknames for our boys. Charlie has become Choo Choo, Chooch or Charlie Choo Choo.
Zacharie is also known around the house as Bunny, Chicken Man or Spider Man. None of them make sense, but they're the pet names we call our children and you can be guaranteed I'll never introduce you to them with those names.
I will introduce you to my boys Charlie and Zacharie and expect them to be called that, not Chuck and Zach.
I originally wrote this in June 2010. 18 months later, we still have the same problems. *shrug*
It's a timely repost since a new children's book, My Name Is Elizabeth, tackles the topic for a girl with the name of a Queen who is frustrated by being called Lizzie.
How do you handle people who shorten your kids' names?
My almost 2-year-old uses a soother just for bed time. You can ask him and he'll pull the plug and hand it to you, no worries. My dentist is pleased (although he would like us to pull the binky permanently).
However, if my son has an iPad and you ask him to hand it to you, it's not going to happen. You can't even take the iPad and replace with an iPhone, he knows which one he wants and he's not ready to give it up. The dependence we now have on technology to entertain our kids has led to some experts calling tablets "digital pacifiers."
As much as kids enjoy playing with an iPad, parents should limit the amount of time they spend plopped down with the device, said Gwenn O’Keeffe, a pediatrician in Boston who has studied the effects of technology on children and works with the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Toddlers under 2 shouldn’t play with an iPad unless it’s only being used to display books, she said. Victoria Nash, a researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute who also has studied the topic, said some parents use gadgets as a “digital pacifier.”
“We know already that there are dangers with watching too much television and doing too much online gaming,” she said. [Bloomberg]
One of the effects of too much screen time is a delay in speech development. My 23-month-old only has a handful of words, most of them not fully formed. There is no doubt my younger son's speech is behind the development my older son (no iPad) showed.
Still, the iPad is a treat for the couch or the playroom in our house. We don't have a minivan that will blast Dora, Diego, and the Wonder Pets every time the family gets loaded up to go to the grocery store. And when we get there, I don't hand them an iPhone to stare at while I wander the aisles.
Some swing the meter far to the other side. Waldorf Schools don't allow any access to technology until 8th grade, and encourage parents to continue that ideology at home.
Waldorf schools ... subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans. The Waldorf method is nearly a century old, but its foothold here among the digerati puts into sharp relief an intensifying debate about the role of computers in education.
“I fundamentally reject the notion you need technology aids in grammar school,” said Alan Eagle, 50, whose daughter, Andie, is one of the 196 children at the Waldorf elementary school; his son William, 13, is at the nearby middle school. “The idea that an app on an iPad can better teach my kids to read or do arithmetic, that’s ridiculous.” [NYT]
I'm trying to strike a balance between digital and analog play for my children. Along with the digital books that we share, I still turn pages and my iPhone attached son equally loves the time he spends on my lap reading books by Oliver Jeffers.
If you think your kid is spending too much time on their iPad and not enough time outside getting some exercise, don't blame the iPad. Before the iPad, they were playing video games, and before video games they were watching TV, and before TV they were reading comic books.
Throughout history, you will uncover generations of youth who would rather sit around and play than go outside and play. It's not technologies' fault that a kid is lazy... it comes down to parenting, values and the child's disposition. [Twist Image]
How do you handle technology in your home? Video games, iPads, iPods, Gameboys, TVs, etc.
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