All Purpose Parenting Thread

Doesn't the kid get splinters?

Seriously though, we use Huggies. Not environmentally friendly, but we own LOTS of Kimberly-Clark stock.

And the number one criteria for picking a high chair should be how easy it will be to clean up after meals.

Good rule of thumb: Beware of the grandparents. A lot of people seem to think the parents they had all those issues with growing up somehow magically changes into a sweet old geriatric who does nothing but bounce kids on their knees and buy toys and candy all day. Not true. They're the same fucked up people they were before you found a partner and had kids. Case in point: When I was, say, six or seven, I started to have lots of questions about all these girls I was running into at school. My grandfather spent a lot of the conversation telling me how you had to make a girl happy or they'd go find someone else to play with and how he would put pennies in his mouth and think about baseball. As a kid, this conversation confused the fuck out of me. Flash forward ten years, and I recall the conversation as an adolescent and realize he was warning me that sexual inadequacy would lead your girlfriend/wife to fuck around on you and was sharing tips on how to stave off climaxing... to a freaking six-year-old. Also, the grandfather on my Dad's side started teaching me hand-to-hand combat at five and once had a very long conversation with me about the quickest and safest ways to kill a man in a bar fight. So, yeah, set strict boundries with your parents about what they can say and do around your kids.

So...good advice....bad timing from old gramps then. I bet you weren't complaining when you killed that guy in a bar fight at age 10.

Anyhoo, we use huggies, mostly because we have an apartment that has quarter operated laundry. Amen to the high chair, we have one where I can detach the top part of the tray to either hand wash or run through the dishwasher.

We have a 18 month old and here is some of what I’ve learned…

The Jumping Monkeys Podcast is pretty good if you are looking for kid info for people of our generation.

GoGoBabyz travelmate stroller attachment for car seats is a must if you travel much. I love the thing and it beats the hell out of packing the seat and the stroller around the airport.

Our little boy loves airplanes. When he gets too amped up we can calm him down with a couple of videos from flightlevel350.com.

Getting the baby involved in play groups at a early age is a great thing. Our little guy has been going to groups from just about day 1 and does a good job with sharing and playing with others.

Busting out the sprinkler on a hot day is a fun time for the entire family.

After working with roomfulls of children 5-13 for 4 years in college for a day care that was illegally understaffed (I was only 18-22) the best advice I can think of for children between those ages is to not treat them like children, and don't bother yelling. When parents talk down to their kids the kids don't usually get that they're being talked down to and think the parents are dumbasses, and when parents yell all day it loses all its athority.



And if anyone is aiming to teach kids, or has kids in early elementary, you should read my mom's book, because I'll eventually get those residuals.

Shamless Mom Plug

They hear everything. I mean everything.

Best example I have, money has been tight this summer for us since production has been slow around here. And my wife and I talk about it, but we always think we talk about it away form our son (he is 4). The other day we were at a museum gift shop and I was getting him a little something and he want to my mom and asked her if we had enough money for it. Fucking broke my heart when she told me that.

So, remember they hear everything.

Read to them all the time.

Let them hear real music along with kids music. Putumayo makes great CD's for kids with all types of music.

GeekDads is one of my favorite sites for stuff.

Also, I know with my son, we have to limit the kinds of cartoons he can watch. Even stuff you might think is appropriate you should monitor.

By the way, I feel like the old man since my son is 4. Thanks jackasses.

Where/how much?

Basically my one nugget is that, in general, what you're worried about ain't that big a deal.

All I know is that if my daughter watches Freaky Friday one more time, I'm going to weep.

I turned Bob the Builder into a massive mob series in my head while watching the thing over and over when my son was watching it like a religion. But Thomas still weirds me out.

I grew up on Thomas.

At the store where I work we have these children's carts that basically look like Little Tyke's semi cabs with carts for the trailer. There's no windshield at all on them and children love to climb up onto the hood and then try to get up onto the roof. Not enough parents realize that just because kids get a lot of scrapes and still spring back doesn't mean you shouldn't be keeping a more watchful eye.

Not saying that anyone in this thread is one of those parents, just an observation.

I still tend to feel I'm too damn overprotective; I don't want anything to make my daughter cry, but then again, the other side of the coin is that if you don't let them touch the hot stove they won't realize it burns.

That's the line I'm least looking forward to having to figure out with my own kids one day.

Watch Bill Cosby - Himself when your kids are 3 - 5. I have 3 kids all 5 or younger. I had never seen Himself, but I was able to finish a couple of the 'jokes'. They're not really jokes; they're true. But funny.

All kid are brain damaged.

My tips:

*Try not to have a television in your living room or on the main level of your house. This allows that area of your home to be peaceful and more conducive to spending quality time together.

*Make sure you stock up on books instead of toys. I love the fact that my daughter automatically goes for her books instead of her toys. Of course going through five readings of The Lorax can be a chore.

*Seuss is a great verbal workout.

*Introduce your kid to fruits and vegetables at an early age to help them develop eating habits. This will also help you with eating healthier.

* Try not to freak out when a sibling or parent buys McDonalds or ice cream when watching your kid.

*Remember, teaching your child where to throw garbage away is a great thing, but when they see your enthusiastic response the first few times they do it they'll think that they will get that response every time they put something in the bin ("THERE'S my cell phone!")

I've only got nieces and nephews, but I'm going to say these are absolutely solid pieces of advice. The niece I spend the most time with absolutely loves McDonalds, and my sister lets her have it a lot of the time. When she's with me I force her to eat a lot of good stuff in order to get the bad stuff. Sure, she can have a soda and candy at the movie, but only if she's ate a healthy lunch.

Plus, my parents NEVER fed me the food stuff as a kid, and only now after almost 3 decades on this planet have I begun eating things other than meat or potatoes. Kids love grapes, start with grapes.

Keep introducing all kinds of foods to them while they're young. When my son first started eating solid foods, he would eat a ton of different things. As he got older, some of those things have "worn off", so to speak, but there's still enough there that he still loves a good assortment of fruits and vegetables. Plus, other than a hamburger and meat sauce, the only "meat" he really likes to eat is fish. He loves salmon, tilapia, tuna, flounder...he likes just about any whitefish.

Also, keep introducing all kinds of activities and things to them. You'll never know what they'll latch on to. One morning I was taking my son to school, I saw that "Roy Rogers" was on Radio Classics (a station on Sirius that plays old radio shows), and I turned it to that (I was sick of Kid's Stuff). He was completely enthralled--I had to explain the concept to him of a radio "drama", and he started calling it "TV on the radio", and now that's all he wants to listen to when we get in the car. He loves Jack Benny, The Whistler, Dragnet, Superman, The Lone Ranger...and all of the mystery/detective dramas. He actually does an impression of Jack Benny that's kind of funny to hear. He'll be 7 in a month. He also just started flag football, so we'll see how that goes. He could care less about watching a game on TV, but he loves to play.

That is incredibly awesome.

You can find a lot of them on archive.org. My son has discovered super heroes so I burned a bunch of old Superman radio shows for him. We listen to them on road trips.

Very true. Listened to this with my siblings growing up and laughed at Cos' delivery. Now I laugh as a father for it's truthfulness.

Invaluable practical items:

• The infant dishwasher baskets for bottle-nipples and small parts saved us so much time.
• Any kind of air-filter, fan, or white-noise maker is great for helping our kid sleep during naps, trips away from home, etc.

Concur. Even if it's just a radio with static turned down low, it doesn't matter. Our main problem with the basket was sometimes parts of the bottle would slip through the openings.

A rocking chair/glider with an ottoman in the kid's bedroom is also a good thing to have. You rock them to sleep, then the crib is right there.

Potty training: Buy one of those soft kids potty seats (an insert to place on the regular toilet) and a short Rubbermaid stepping stool to help the little one climb up onto the seat.

Install black-out roller shades in the kids rooms. Makes it easier to get them to sleep at nap time and when it's still light in the evening during summer months.

Some good things on this thread. I have a 10 month old daughter, so I'm right there in the thick of things, especially since she starting walking a few weeks ago. Crazy times!

I will second the cloth diaper love, although we are using them primarily for a reason I've not seen mentioned here. The material itself. Not only does it feel nicer to the touch (which I assume means it is more comfortable for my daughter), but my daughter has sensitive skin, and she was getting some rashes and skin issues in disposables, but not with cloth. We think it might have been the dyes in the disposables because it seemed to be concentrated around colored areas of the disposables.

Also, the rocking/gliding chair with ottoman is fantastic. One thing, though, it seems that some babies will then expect to rocked to sleep and not be able to sleep well without rocking. We did a lot of it when our daughter was REALLY little (because she was having lots of problems sleeping), but now we only do it if we think something is wrong (pain from teething, stomach ache, etc.), otherwise she starts to depend on it, and that can become bad very quickly.

I see parents with fluffy cloth bibs on their messy-eating toddlers. Why? Why? We've got one big pocketed plasticy bib that we just wipe off and re-use. And it's washing machine safe so we can toss it in now and then.

We're also big fans of the Snack Trap, which will both let her eat her snack and keep her occupied whenever we're out, but we have an odd child who is generally well-behaved and doesn't rip the top off and dump everything out.

YES!!!

My daughter's favorite CD's to listen to while travelling or at home are the soundtrack to Spirited Away and Howl's moving castle.

Absolutely loves them.

Also 3rd the love for the re-useable pocket bibs and will add a vote in for the themed plastic placemats that they sell for the dinner table. They are great to use when dining out and (for someone like me anyway) the cleanliness of the tabletop can be suspect.

Those are awesome. That and throw a papery disposable pocketed bib in the diaper bag, and eating out is a breeze*.

*relatively speaking

If you have kids that are teething, this rocks as well. And even if they're not teething but just starting to eat regular foods, you can use it as well.

We have the grocery store version of that thing, and it's great. Taught my son to love apples.

Activities... Toys, arts & crafts, playground, swimming, TV are all kind of common, but my daughter and I put on puppet shows and have dance parties (turn on the stereo or a music channel). The dance parties are especially good when the kid has cabin fever or too much energy and it's miserable outside. I put on some funk or rock and she has a ball, rockin' out. Sometimes she "jams along" on her Barbie guitar or mike. If the music is more classical, she pretends to be a ballerina. This past week, she asked me to dance and proceded to tell me the jokes she heard during the ballroom sketches on the Muppet Show.

We didn't do this for our daughter, and our friends did.

Maybe Rory is overly easy going, but all I know is our kid will sleep through a nuclear attack and a butterfly brushing up against the window screen wakes up our friends' daughter.

Is it a bad idea? Dunno, but I will say "mileage varies"

There's been a lot of talk already about entertainment/TV but I have another question along those lines that was inspired by my viewing of Speed Racer for the first time last night.

For those of you with kids in, say, the 4-6 age bracket, where do you draw the line on what kind of stuff they can watch? Our son is pretty great at knowing his own limits (he says he won't be ready to watch Star Wars until he's 10. He's 5 now), but we have some pretty hard and fast rules anyway, for his current age. These will obviously relax as he gets older, but for now:

-No guns
-No fighting/violence/death
-No sexual stuff
-No profanity

Speed Racer had 3 out of 4, so he won't be watching it. I remember in the discussion thread for the film when it came out, many people were saying it was fine for kids. Yeah, for a 9 year old maybe. Anything younger than that and it crosses the line, IMHO.

My kid still won't even watch Pixar stuff, even though most of it would be fine...he's sensitive like his mother*. The opening race in Cars is too intense for him.

Our rules also rule out say, Castle in the Sky, due to the gunfight/chase/laser-bots at the end. He's seen Totoro and Kiki's delivery service, but seems to have no interest in them at all any more. When we do let him watch TV, he only wants to watch Blue's Clues, which I'm actually pretty happy about, as that's a completely harmless show that teaches some good lessons.

Also, Steve>Joe. Truth.

*This could be a subject for a whole other thread about the viewing standards and habits of our significant others. She's got some, er, interesting hang-ups.

We are victims of Disney's latest blitzkrieg- Tinker Bell. There has been a full on marketing assault for this little pain in the ass and my kids are completely on board. The new DVD, the Pixie Hollow website, the flamethrower, oy. Don't let it's feature film division fool you. Disney still knows how to infiltrate your homes like no other.

No KUNG-FU PANDA? No INCREDIBLES? No SLEEPING BEAUTY, SNOW WHITE, Superheroes, Godzilla, etc?

Man, you're strict.

My son is 4 and he did fine with Speed Racer. Really, nothing negative. Right now he is on a big superhero kick, so that has been interesting. He can handle the old Filmation cartoons and Superfriends. He also is a big fan of Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.

But the animated stuff from the 90's he really can't handle. He acts out too much from it.

What's weird is that I was a Godzilla/Ultraman/Jonny Socko nut at age 5. But like I said, he's a sensitive kid. We've actually tried to make him branch out. I think Star Wars would be fine, for example. But he freaks out at the menu screen on the DVD, so it's not worth forcing the issue. Really, we're kind of following his lead. He hasn't *asked* to watch any of the stuff you mentioned. If he asks, he'll probably be ready then.

Keep in mind what content he might be exposed to on a 'play-date' at a friend's house. My son saw the Spider-man films and SW: Episode 3 before I was planning to let him. Not that it was such a bad thing (he was almost six), but I'd have preferred to be there to explain some aspects.

When he was four and a half I though it would be fine for him to see Batman:TAS. Like Casey Moore experienced, he acted out too much and I had to put those DVDs away.

My son is completely into Monster Trucks. Monster Jam races. Its insane.

the good news is that the Hot Wheels cars are $3.10 at Target. So its a cheap obsession for an almost 3 year old.

His other obsession is the Imagination Movers (which I swear is one of the best kids music CDs out there).

My son started watching the Star Wars movies just before he turned 6. When he was about 6 1/2, he started watching Part III...about the time Anakin started turning "eveeeil", he said to my wife, "You can turn it off. I don't want to watch any more."

He loves Indy, although I still haven't let him see Temple of Doom. He also has liked recently Get Smart, Underdog, and has been asking if he can watch Hellboy, because he likes the monsters. Although every time we have a free moment, I'll ask if he wants to watch it, and he'll go, "Nah." We did watch the first X-Men movie last weekend, and he said he liked it. But when Wolverine called Cyclops "dick", I had to explain that to him.

Jack has see the Indy films, sans Temple of Doom, and loved them (loves the Indy Lego DS game too). He's asked about watching Hellboy at home (I refused), but I suspect that he's already seen it at a neighbour's house, since he can identify all the characters as toys in Toys'R'Us.

That hobo seems nice enough.

My son's favorite movie is Dawn of the Dead. Some might say I'm a bad parent for exposing him to that at such a young age but I say those people are suckers. While your children are lunch meat for the oncoming zombie horde mine will be wading his way through a swath of the dead he just killed.

Original or remake?

Both actually. He watched the original first but tends to gravitate more towards the remake.

Although his favorite is Shaun of the Dead. Between that and The Dark Crystal it's about the only two DVD's he'll watch outside of the Shrek's and Pixar stuff.

speaking as a parent with older children, the most salient advice I can give you comes in two parts:

First, set things in stone early on. Teach your kids respect...and teach them why it's important to be respectful. Give them every ounce of respect they earn. Do it early on. It will pay off when they're older.

Second, learn to lean on will rather than emotion. Once boundaries have been defined, the child will push at them to try and wear you down. It will feel like a personal (and stupid) attack on you. DO NOT SWEAT IT. Let it bounce off of your emotions and let your will be the one to support your actions. Keep this in mind: You were shitty at times to your folks. Your kids are going to be just as shitty to you. And they will likely not give a second throught to it. And they'll do monumentally stupid shit and wonder why you're pissed at them ("Why did you do that today when you just got in trouble for it yesterday?" "I dunno").

Be patient. Be loving. And make sure they know the *why* behind the rules. And pray you don't kill them before they get out of high school.