Fussbucket has moved to a new web address: http://www.fussbucketblog.com.
All the original posts from here are now located over there too, as well as new daily posts.If you have an email subscription, it is very easy to re-subscribe to the new site. I hope you’ll take just a moment to do that. And if you have us bookmarked, take a sec to change the address for Fussbucket in your blog folder.
Hope to see you at our new digs!
by Stacey
Thanks to the kind people at BlogHer, Fussbucket will now be hosting ads! But in order to make it all work, we had to move the site to a new address. So please follow along with us!
If you have us bookmarked, please change the address to: http://www.fussbucketblog.com
If you’re receiving email or RSS feeds, you’ll need to subscribe again. There are links on the new site to facilitate that simple process.
You won’t need to register to comment on the new site, so I’m hoping you all will keep right on commenting. The site looks and feels mostly the same as our comfy, old site here on WordPress. Thanks much to the folks over here.
One last thing, none of this would have happened were it not for the tenacious brilliance of Kristin, our tech guru. Thanks so much to her. She’s a coding, widget wizard.
I really hope you’ll join us at Fussbusketblog.com. Oh, and if you run into any problems over there, please let us know. You can email me at: stacey@fussbucketblog.com.
Cheers!
by Stacey
My Fussbucket partner Kristin recently watched Al Gore’s movie on global warming called “An Inconvenient Truth.” Since then this whole business about the frightening state of the environment has been bugging her. Makes me think they were on to something with the title of the movie.
She’s decided she wants to start a Green Parenting Group and has proposed the idea on a parenting listserve here in Seattle. This is from her post:
I haven’t been a big environmentalist, but I am getting motivated to take
responsibility for my family’s impact. I also want to look at what I’m
teaching my kids about consumption and their interconnection with
everyone (and everything) else. Since I’m so new to this whole thing,
I’d love to meet up with other families working through these projects
too.
I think this is a great idea. If it takes off, I’m hoping Kristin will report back here on her progress and give us some words of wisdom. In the meantime, I remembered this article from the NY Times last month on smart ways to eat organic without breaking the bank.
The key is to be strategic in your organic purchases. Opting for organic produce, for instance, doesn’t necessarily have a big impact, depending on what you eat. According to the Environmental Working Group, commercially-farmed fruits and vegetables vary in their levels of pesticide residue. Some vegetables, like broccoli, asparagus and onions, as well as foods with peels, such as avocados, bananas and oranges, have relatively low levels compared to other fruits and vegetables.
So how do you make your organic choices count? Pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene, whose new book “Raising Baby Green” explains how to raise a child in an environmentally-friendly way, has identified a few “strategic” organic foods that he says can make the biggest impact on the family diet, the article says.
1. Milk: “When you choose a glass of conventional milk, you are buying into a whole chemical system of agriculture,’’ says Dr. Greene. People who switch to organic milk typically do so because they are concerned about the antibiotics, artificial hormones and pesticides used in the commercial dairy industry. One recent United States Department of Agriculture survey found certain pesticides in about 30 percent of conventional milk samples and low levels in only one organic sample. The level is relatively low compared to some other foods, but many kids consume milk in large quantities.
This reminds me of the time I was in the grocery store before I had kids and the woman in front of me had a cart filled to the brim. I watched as she unloaded her stuff and was increasingly horrified to see not one, not two, but three gallons of milk on the conveyor belt. I asked her about it and she said her kids drank milk all the time. I considered suggesting she buy herself a cow instead.
2. Potatoes: Potatoes are a staple of the American diet — one survey found they account for 30 percent of our overall vegetable consumption. A simple switch to organic potatoes has the potential to have a big impact because commercially-farmed potatoes are some of the most pesticide-contaminated vegetables. A 2006 U.S.D.A. test found 81 percent of potatoes tested still contained pesticides after being washed and peeled, and the potato has one of the the highest pesticide contents of 43 fruits and vegetables tested, according to the Environmental Working Group.
Yuck. I didn’t know this. They look so innocent all dirt-covered and funny-shaped. Okay, organic potatoes it is.
3. Peanut butter: More acres are devoted to growing peanuts than any other fruits, vegetable or nut, according to the U.S.D.A. More than 99 percent of peanut farms use conventional farming practices, including the use of fungicide to treat mold, a common problem in peanut crops. Given that some kids eat peanut butter almost every day, this seems like a simple and practical switch. Commercial food firms now offer organic brands in the regular grocery store, but my daughter loves to go to the health food store and grind her own peanut butter.
We’re lucky not to have the dreaded peanut allergy in our house (although the jury is still out on Sascha). But every school I know of has at least one kid who is allergic. Growing up, my brother ate peanut butter sandwiches everyday for about seven years. These days, Sage is lucky if he gets one a week because he can’t bring it to school in his lunch.
4. Ketchup: For some families, ketchup accounts for a large part of the household vegetable intake. About 75 percent of tomato consumption is in the form of processed tomatoes, including juice, tomato paste and ketchup. Notably, recent research has shown organic ketchup has about double the antioxidants of conventional ketchup.
Ketchup? What are we Ronald Reagan? Frankly, I’m more disturbed by this: “For some families, ketchup accounts for a large part of the household vegetable intake,” than I am about this: “Recent research has shown organic ketchup has about double the antioxidants of conventional ketchup.” But whatever. Eat organic ketchup.
5. Apples: Apples are the second most commonly eaten fresh fruit, after bananas, and they are also used in the second most popular juice, after oranges, according to Dr. Greene. But apples are also one of the most pesticide-contaminated fruits and vegetables. The good news is that organic apples are easy to find in regular grocery stores.
Yay, apples! For a complete list of Dr. Greene’s strategic organic choices, visit Organic Rx on his website.
Now for an amusing and unrelated segway: Greenpeace wants to name a whale and has gone to great lengths to dream up a long list of 29 earth/crunchy names (Paz, Manami, Libertad, etc.) for people to vote on.
The 30th name? Mr. Splashy Pants, with 65 percent of the vote and garnering 16 times the votes of the leading next contender. “Based on the earnestness of the rest of the site, this appears to be an unintended consequence of enviro culture clashing with popular culture,” writes my friend Jon at the National Resources Defense Council, who I thank for the tip. “Run,” he advises, “Cast your votes.”
UPDATE: Check out Kristin’s new blog - “Going Green Family.” It’s got tips on going green for the holidays and easy ways to make your home more eco-friendly.
by Stacey
Last night I had one of those horrible mother dreams where my child is in peril and there’s nothing I can do to save him. Whenever I have this kind of dream, it haunts me for the rest of the day. I keep seeing the images and recalling the feelings and it makes me think about what life would be like if I did lose one of my children.
So as I sipped my morning coffee, I was drawn to read this article in Newsweek about how parents cope after losing a child. Every year, about 25,000 kids under age 10 die, most from congenital anomalies, unintentional injury (mainly car accidents), premature birth and cancer, the article says. The issue the article looks at, is the decision parents face over whether or not to have another child.
The loss of a child can put tremendous stress on even the best marriages and the closest families. “Losing a kid makes you lose faith in life,” says child psychiatrist Alvin Rosenfeld. “To reclaim that faith in living, that it’s worth doing this again, is an act of enormous courage.”
Anecdotally, many experts say parents seem to do better when they try again, the article says. “The most profound attachment in human life is mother and child,” says John Golenski, executive director of the George Mark Children’s House, a residential facility in San Leandro, Calif., for kids with terminal illnesses and their families. “The best adaptation to [the loss of a child] is another attachment.”
But understandably, some fear the pain of loss again. And others who do have another child sometimes feel guilty. “What I do hear a lot is the feeling of, ‘Am I betraying my child who died?’ ” says Barbara Sourkes, director of the pediatric palliative-care program at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford. ” ‘How can I throw myself wholeheartedly into a new child and leave the child who died behind?’ “
As I write this post I keep thinking, why am I upsetting all of my dear readers with this topic? And the answer is, I don’t really know. This evening my husband and I are meeting with an estate lawyer to begin writing our will and establish custody for our children if we were to die unexpectedly.
A few weeks ago I dreamed that I had left my older son Sage alone at home while I went on a driving trip. My husband was away too and suddenly I realized that Sage was far too young to be in the house all by himself. I began to panic because I was so far away. When I woke up, I realized that dream was about my husband and I dying and leaving our children to fend for themselves in the world.
I didn’t know that when I had kids life would suddenly seem so fragile and precious. It’s not a feeling I walk around with everyday, thank god. But for today, I really don’t care if Sage decides not to listen to me or if Sascha cries every time I leave the room. They’re alive and safe with me. That’s all I care about. Tomorrow is another story.
by Stacey
We returned from our trip back east on Saturday, this time with plenty of diapers in our bag. Forgetting the diaper bag on the way out was definitely not our greatest parenting moment. But taking our almost-four-year old son Sage on a train ride to New York City and then on a subway ride to Brooklyn, I think counts as one of our better ones. We capped it off with a trip to the New York Transit Museum which had a bunch of old subway cars we could explore and a real city bus Sage could pretend to drive.
Sascha stayed home with his Grandma and got to go the grocery store. It was okay. He likes to sit in the cart and make faces at people.
How was your holiday? Got any good family stories to tell?
by Stacey
Ahh, Sesame Street. Remember this? “The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.” Why am I not surprised to learn that according to this article in the NY Times, our preschool age kids can’t handle it?
Recently released DVD’s of the old versions of the show come with a warning: “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”
Good grief. “The old ‘Sesame Street’ is not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for softies born since 1998, when the chipper ‘Elmo’s World’ started,” the article says. “Anyone who considers bull markets normal, extracurricular activities sacrosanct and New York a tidy, governable place — well, the original ‘Sesame Street’ might hurt your feelings.”
[The writer] asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”
“Which brought Parente to a feature of ‘Sesame Street’ that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.
I haven’t watched Sesame Street lately, but apparently Cookie Monster eats a more diverse diet than just fistfuls of cookies. Too bad. Why can’t our kids take delight in the idea of a blue furry monster who gets to eat as many cookies as he wants? I didn’t think I was going to be allowed to do that, but I thought it was funny that he could.
I think the old Sesame Street was pretty damn great, actually. Here’s what the article says: “People on “Sesame Street” had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you “out” of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, “Sesame Street” suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading.” I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t want our kids to learn that.
Happy Birthday Chris!
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox
by Stacey
Hello from New Jersey! On Saturday we flew out for a week-long visit with my family. Trekking across the country with two small children is never any fun at all, so we usually try to steel ourselves with lots of books and toys and always, always armfuls of diapers. Just in case. You never know. You might need fifteen diapers in five hours and what would you do if you didn’t have enough? Well, we found out.
As we stood on the curb at the airport at 5:30 in the morning gathering our wits and our belongings I began to look around in panic for the diaper bag. Long story short, I forgot to pick it up as we were running out the door. There it was all nicely packed full of diapers and wipes and extra clothes and some more diapers and a few extra wipes. There it was, in our living room. Very far away. This was bad. We were all set to get on a five hour flight with a ten-month old baby who was not accustomed to “holding it in.”
Luckily the woman standing next to us had a baby with her and she kindly unzipped her bag to reveal her stash of three hundred diapers and ten packs of wipes. She gave us two diapers and wished us luck. I felt like Chris McCandless, the young man in “Into the Wild” who ventured into the wilderness of Alaska with a ten pound bag of rice and a plan to live off the land. He didn’t fare so well. I was hoping for a better outcome.
My plan was to beg for wipes and more diapers once we got on the plane. There’s always at least one other baby on board. I spotted a woman with a baby soon after we settled into our seats and my spirits lifted. As it turned out, Sascha needed only one diaper change during the trip and let’s just say, it wasn’t the messy kind. We actually walked off the plane with an extra diaper from the nice, well-prepared lady back at curbside check-in.
Definitely dodged a bullet that time. So what’s up with all of you?
by Stacey
Over the course of their life, kids cost parents a fortune. More than you may realize. More than you might want to know. So if you don’t want to know, start singing la-la-la and skip on down to the next post.
According to this special report on the cost of kids (ooh, a special report!) in Business Week magazine, parents with some cash to spend will shell out about $300,000 on their kids by the time they turn 18 years old. That doesn’t include college tuition. Say what? Thanks to Salon’s Broadsheet for the tip.
The Agriculture Dept.’s latest survey found that households in the top-third income bracket (with average pretax income of $118,200) will spend $289,380 by their child’s 18th birthday—or about $17,000 a year (in 2006 dollars).
The largest expense is housing, according to an article in the report. A USDA survey found that housing makes up about a third of expenditures for parents, given that people often seek out more space and good schools. Health care is also sucking up more of parents’ hard-earned cash given that premiums and co-payments have been rising, says USDA economist Mark Fino.
Indeed, the USDA survey is probably understating the cost of raising kids. Considering extras like sports equipment, summer camps, private school, Disney vacations, and a full-time nanny, raising a child through age 17 could cost $1 million or more. Some parents throw extravagant birthday parties and won’t hesitate to buy their kids the latest video games and cell phones and splurge on Spanish and painting lessons.
It gets worse. There’s a whole bunch of additional expenses that the survey left out, including, ummm, college tuition. Hello? “According to reports from the College Board, a private four-year college runs an average of $23,712 per year (up 6.3% from the 2006/07 school year), while a public four-year college costs $6,185 (up 6.6% from last year),” the article says. “The ‘good news,’ says the College Board, ‘is more than $130 billion in financial aid is available.’”
Then, after college, many parents are welcoming their children back home until they find a job. In fact, 25% of employed parents have kids aged 18 to 29 living in their home at least half the time. Parents contribute $2,200 annually (on average, in 2001 dollars) to children aged 18 to 34, according to a 2003 University of Pennsylvania study. This transition to adulthood “is a very risky period,” says Arlene Skolnick, a visiting scholar at New York University and research scholar at Counsel on Contemporary Families.
Parents live in fear that their children will not acquire the skills they need to earn at least a middle-class salary, the article says. “Children that earn a bachelor’s degree stand to earn over 60% more than those with only a high school diploma, the College Board says. Over a lifetime, the gap in earning potential between a high school diploma and a B.A. is more than $800,000, it says.”
Then kids go on to have their own kids and some decide not to work, (ahem, like me) so they can stay home with their children and spend even more money. “Studies have estimated that indirect costs, such as foregone earnings, oftentimes exceed direct costs, especially if one parent has to drop out of the workforce,” says Fino at the USDA.
On top of all that, growth in wages for U.S. workers has been minuscule or stagnant, while inflation has crept higher. Average hourly earnings rose just 0.7% last year after declining in 2005 and 2004, versus the peak annual growth rate of 4.1% for 1972, according to the Labor Dept. Meanwhile, prices for food, energy, and other goods keep rising, as measured by the 3.2% rise in the consumer price index last year.
It’s information like this that just might make some people think twice before having kids. Everyone tells you about the sleep and the tantrums and the runny noses and you don’t believe it will actually happen to you or at least that it couldn’t possibly be as bad as they say. But when it’s written down in dollars and cents, it’s hard to deny.
It’s costs such as these that make 28-year-old Bahar Zaker in Syracuse, N.Y., want to put off having kids, maybe forever. “We can’t imagine how we would manage the costs of kids,” says Zaker, who has been married for three years to a philosophy professor and is finishing her thesis on French surrealist art at the University of California. One big hurdle for her is the price of education, and she questions whether it pays off. “The costs of education are going up, and you’re not always sure the value of the education is going up with them,” she says. But she also admits that not having kids is a lifestyle choice. “We both like to travel,” she says.
Yeah, well so did we. The article ends with the hope that the government or some other “savior” as the writer puts it, will help families with all this financial burden.”Everyone who wants to may join the paid labor force, but almost no one gets a family wage or enough help from government to defray the costs of raising children,” says Phillip Longman, author of the book The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (Perseus Books Group, 2004). He figures the critical moment will emerge during the next decade, “as millions of Baby Boomers start crashing past the boundaries of old age, and as today’s teenagers find themselves saddled with massive student loans, rising taxes, and growing frustration over the difficulty of forming or affording a family.”
Until then, as Longman puts it bluntly: “Child rearing is fast becoming a sucker’s game. Though the psychic rewards remain, the economic returns to individual parents have largely disappeared, while the cost of parenthood is soaring.”
For more:
Here’s a debate on whether or not it’s worth the cost.
Here are some tips on how to make ends meet.
Here’s an article on great places to raise kids for less.
Here’s one on how to go to college for free.
Here’s another on entrepreneurs targeting parents.
by Stacey
Two new studies shed some positive light on irksome behavior problems in young children. According to this article in the NY Times, one study showed that kindergartners who are identified as troubled do as well academically as their peers in elementary school. The other study found that children with attention deficit disorders suffer primarily from a delay in brain development, not from a deficit or flaw.
In one study, reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, an international team of researchers analyzed measures of social and intellectual development from over 16,000 children, the article says. Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found.
In the other study, researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health and McGill University, using imaging techniques, found that the brains of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder developed normally but more slowly in some areas than the brains of children without the disorder, the article says. The disorder, also known as A.D.H.D., is by far the most common psychiatric diagnosis given to disruptive young children; 3 percent to 5 percent of school-age children are thought to be affected.
Doctors said that the report, being published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps to explain why so many children grow out of the diagnosis in middle school or later, often after taking stimulant medications to improve concentration in earlier grades.
[G]overnment psychiatric researchers compared brain scans from two groups of children: one with attention deficit disorder, the other without. The scientists had tracked the children — 223 in each group — from ages 6 to 16, taking multiple scans on each child.
In a normally developing brain, the cerebral cortex — the outer wrapping, where circuits involved in conscious thought are concentrated — thickens during early childhood. It then reverses course and thins out, losing neurons as the brain matures through adolescence. The study found that, on average, the brains of children with A.D.H.D. began this “pruning” process at age 10 ½, about three years later than their peers.
The article says that about 80 percent of those kids with attention problems were taking or had taken stimulant drugs, and the researchers did not know the effect of the medications on brain development. Doctors consider stimulant drugs a reliable way to improve attention in the short term; the new study is not likely to change that attitude.
This all seems like good news for kids. It’s good to know that kids are learning what they need to know even if they’re wiggling and protesting along the way. As for ADHD, seems like it would be a relief to know there’s a good chance your child will outgrow it over time. The article says that three out of four kids with the disorder grow out of it.
