My kids cured my texting while driving habit

If you really are serious about breaking the very dangerous habit of texting while driving or checking your e-mails when that cell phone gives off that irresistible buzz, put a bounty on your head. That's how I cured myself of the temptation to look at my Blackberry when it rattles in my cupholder, inviting me to check out this hilarious lawyer joke or that plea from the African prince to hide his millions for him.

It hit me one day that my kids may be little, but I have future drivers in the car and I need to set an example. So I gave my kids permission to call me on it, and if anyone catches me sending a text or responding to an e-mail while the car is in motion, they get $5. I've only had to pay it once. With 5 bucks in hand, my son is worse (or better, depending on your point of view). He's now ruthlessly pouncing if I so much as glance at that buzzing BlackBerry. 

I am allowed to check it at red lights and send a text if I am stopped or if I pull over. But if the car is moving my Text Patrol is on duty. Sometimes, my red light queries turn up a text or an e-mail I want to respond to, so I hand the phone to my 11 year old and say something like "text Daddy that we'll be home in 10 minutes, does he need me to pick up anything?"

That's how I got my first $5 ticket. The dear boy was being my secretary and updating our Whoa, Momma! Twitter feed for me when I had taken them to check out the new Animation exhibit at MOSI. This is my work, so I didn't want my Twitter feed to sound like an 11 year old had written it, so I insisted on reading it before he hit the Update button. That's when the sucker nailed me. At first I protested, but he was right. I could have waited until the next red light or pulled over before doing an admittedly silly thing like a Twitter update. How idiotic would I have felt if I'd gotten into an accident over Twitter? I paid.

I think I have converted the kids and they now pester their aunts or other drivers not to look at their phones when driving. And they love to recount the tale of the most unlucky teen ever, the Tampa girl who was a perfect storm of bad behaviors. She skipped class at Freedom High to make a Taco Bell run. She was texting her boyfriend about a burrito order when she ran into a car that was stopped at a light. And not just any car, a police car! I encourage you to tell this story to your kids. It's hilarious and fortunate that she wasn't killed and if nothing else, she lives on in infamy in our car as an object lesson of what not to do.

-- Sharon Kennedy Wynne

Pregnant, flying as Swine flu pandemic is declared

It's the week of my brother's wedding. Seven months pregnant and jittery about flying (my doctor said it was safe to fly), I'm worried about airplane germs and contemplating buying a face mask. On the day of my flight from Florida to Michigan, the World Health Organization finally formally declares the Swine flu outbreak a pandemic.

At the airport, I ask a TSA official where I can get a mask. He points to a shop behind him. There, I buy one for about 2 bucks. I feel like a hypochondriac once I unwrap it on the plane. As far as I can tell, I am the only one with a mask on my flight to Detroit, in Detroit Metro Airport, on the flight back to Tampa, and at Tampa International.

"Don't these people know there's a pandemic going on?" I wondered as I took note of several folks at each location coughing and sneezing almost nonstop.

On the way up, I apologize in advance to my row-mates, which include a mother with an infant, who smartly brought along disinfectant wipes for the flight. Then my mask goes on. I get curious looks, but, considering that quite a few of the fatalities so far from swine flu have been pregnant women, I am taking no chances. I also came armed with cough drops and hand sanitizer. I can feel the difference as the humidity that my mask creates keeps my throat from getting dry, which helps fight off the dreaded airplane cold.

-- Dory Knight-Ingram

Photo: Juperimages.com

Sexual assaults at Orlando water parks

Look out, pervs in the pool! Like we really don't have enough to worry about, now comes news of four sexual assaults on teen girls in the last three weeks at Orlando’s Wet n’ Wild and SeaWorld's Aquatica. The only good news, if you want to call it that, is the girls all quickly alerted authorities and there have been arrests, but still the creepiness is shocking. An Orlando Sentinel review of more than a year's worth of records shows only four sexual-related complaints at the area's water parks.

A spokesman for SeaWorld's Aquatica told the Sentinel the incidents have prompted a security review.

I don't want to be an alarmist, however. Keep in mind that the Orlando area gets 25-million visitors every summer. So four assaults is very, very low. But it is something to talk to your tween and teen girls, who are most often the targets of sexual assaults, usually by drunken 20-somethings who take advantage of a busy park and vacationers letting their guard down.

-- Sharon Kennedy Wynne

[Jupiterimages]

How can anyone live without a pool fence?

As this story outlines all too well, a curious toddler and a swimming pool are a deadly mix. I have a pet peeve when I see in these stories the advice to keep your eyes on your kids at all times. Well, duh. But at some point you have to sleep or you might have another child who falls and bumps his head or any number of reasons really good parents let the unthinkable happen. What I really wish authorities said in these cases is you have to have a backup system like a safety fence.

I really can't understand living in a house with toddlers and having no safety fence around the pool. I know they are expensive -- from $10 to $18 a foot -- so you are looking at $500 to $1,000.There a number of alarms or systems you can look into as well, but I don't think I could have ever slept a wink in my house without our fence around the edge of the pool that you had to be at least 5 feet tall to open (and a strict rule in our house that it was locked at all times).

Do you really think a person can watch a child like a hawk all the time? That they'll never be distracted or sleeping or going to the bathroom and a child will wander out back? One of my favorite books, "Freakonomics," makes the compelling point that children face a far greater risk of death from pools in the house than they do from having a gun in the house. So an unfenced pool is like having a loaded gun just sitting around unlocked.

I guess I just know myself too well and didn't want my scattered brain to be our only safety net.

-- Sharon Kennedy Wynne

Keeping track of kids in a busy theme park

Let's see, purse, keys, sunscreen, water, kids ... kids? ... where'd the kids go?

Summer's here, which means theme park season is in full swing. You may not think it can happen to you, but keeping up with kids in a busy theme park can be as difficult as herding puppies in a beef jerky factory. There are distractions screaming for their attention everywhere.

We recently got an e-mail from Whoa, Momma! reader Joann Parker from Minneapolis who read our post from last summer on five ways to avoid losing your kids on vacation. She sent along a brilliant idea on how to keep up with a large family in a busy vacation spot like a theme park: bright neon baseball caps.

A few years ago, we traveled with another family, as we made our way from Minneapolis to Maine. Our children at the time were ages 6-12. Our friends had bought some brightly-colored baseball caps -- neon yellow for them and neon pink for us! Whenever we stopped someplace where there was a large crowd, each family would wear its caps. At Niagara Falls, where there are throngs of people, the caps were a lifesaver! It was such an easy way to spot either a child or a parent who was not in close proximity.

Thanks for sharing that, Joann. I love those smack-your-forehead brilliant ideas that seem so obvious once you hear them.

Here are some other ideas we've gleaned over the years from more experienced parents:

BRAND THEM: Not literally, of course, but finding a way to stamp your cell phone number on the child can make finding you much easier. Get some of those "Hello My Name is..." stickers, write "Mom's cell phone number" (Don't put your child's name on the badge).

Get some of those cheap rubber bracelets (like those shown here at right) and write your number on them with a Sharpie pen. Speaking of Sharpies, some moms just use them to write their number directly on the child's belly.

DOUBLE VISION: Dress them alike (or in Joann's neon ball caps) so you can say "He's dressed like this" to the park's worker. Or, take a good picture of the kids at the beginning of the day on your digital camera. That way you have a way to show staff members what your kids were dressed in.

TALK EARLY AND OFTEN: I was caught off guard once when I forgot to talk about staying together ahead of time. We arrived at the Nick Hotel just as it was "slime time" at the pool and my 9 year old raced into the crowd before we had a chance to establish some ground rules. It took a long time to find him again among the huge crowd of kids at the water slide. Before you even leave the car, talk about how you will all stay together. Establish rules about holding hands, or how far ahead or behind they can walk and how to find each other if you somehow get separated. At small spaces like a park, we establish a base camp at a picnic table or chairs and let the kids know where to find us before we let them go off and play. For larger spaces, you could pick a landmark to meet if you get separated.

-- Sharon Kennedy Wynne

What are we so afraid of?

After I wrote this post about Lenore Skenazy and her new book Free Range Kids, it generated quite a bit of debate on this blog about how our alarmist culture has us smothering kids in virtual bubble wrap.  Why does shooing the kids outside and telling them to have fun and be home by dark seem irresponsible to so many middle-class parents today? Especially in light of the fact that the crime rate is actually far less than we were kids. As for stranger abductions that seem to be rising, organizations like Stats.org are eager to debunk that. It's so rare it's statistically insignificant.

So here's an update on my interview with Lenore. You can read the full Q and A here. I had told her I had ran the list of scenarios she had put in her book past lots of moms I know. Things like letting a 6 year old ride his bike out of sight or cross the street without holding hands were one thing, but the one they most seemed to choke on was to allow your  9 or 10 year old and a friend to have sundaes alone in an ice cream parlor for about a half hour.

"What do you think is going to happen?" she asked. Well duh, that some some creep will proposition them or try to lure them out to their van to see the puppy or free Wii games they are giving away.

Okay then, she advises, really picture that scenario. Do you really think someone will do that right in front of the waitress, shop owner and other customers and no one will step in? Your kids surely have had a talking to by that age not to be dumb enough to go outside to the van to see the puppy, right? That only leaves that he can drag them by their hair and no one will say, "Hey, umm, stop"? Teach your kids to fight and make a ruckus if they have to, but really they will very very very likely never have to.

As she points out in her book, there's multiple reasons, from the three strikes laws, to the harsher penalties, earlier reports of abuse and even medications for the fact that crime rates have plummeted to 1970 levels. "We should be overjoyed by that," she says. "But instead we want to read the fine print and magnify it and be certain if we don't keep a constant eye on our kids something terrible will happen."

Something terrible is happening: Kids can no longer brag, "I did it myself."

-- Sharon Kennedy Wynne

When does hovering hurt kids?

So I'm reading this book called Free Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. It's written by a humor columnist who writes about what a nation of wimps we've turned into, not letting our kids have the freedom we had as kids to roam the neighborhood and poke around unsupervised. She makes a pretty compelling case for how none of the statistics hold up to our fears and we can be hurting our kids in the long run by not giving them the opportunity to learn self reliance.

The author, Lenore Skenazy, caused a firestorm when she wrote a column about how she let her 9-year-old son ride the subway home alone from Bloomingdales. She's kind of proud of the "America's Worst Mom" tag she earned for that, and people I know who live in New York tell me it's not that out there. Kids do it all the time. The controversy launched her blog and this book.

I'm interviewing Skenazy and will post an update later. But I leave you with this double-dare. Throughout the book she puts up challenges to get you to loosen up. I know few parents who would do all these (though many tell me they are trying). So I ask, would you:

• Cross the street with your school age child (K or above) without holding hands. Make them look around at the traffic.
• Let your little bikers, starting at age 6, ride around the block a couple of times beyond where you can see them
• Drop off your third grader or fourth-grade child and a friend at an ice cream store with money for sundaes. Pick them up in half an hour.
• Let your 10 year old browse a separate part of a department store. Say you are in ladies shoes and he is in the magazine section.

I'll write about my chat with the author in the coming days, so I look forward to your answers to this challenge.

-- Sharon Kennedy Wynne

Lessons learned from Adam Walsh's abduction

It's good to see the Walsh family finally get closure on the horrific abduction  and murder of their 6-year-old son 27 years ago. It was back when parents routinely let their kids play in the toy department unattended. They also let them ride their bikes to school, walk home from the store alone, babysit at age 10 or 11 and do any number of independent acts that draw horrified responses today.

The Walsh case happened in 1981, when a mother wandered away to look at lamps while her son played video games. He was shooed away by a security guard and abducted. A couple of weeks later, his head was found in a canal. In the 27 years since, Adam's father was transformed into an activist who helped put missing children's faces on milk cartons, started fingerprinting programs and increased security at schools and stores.

But there's another way of looking at John Walsh's efforts, said Mount Holyoke College sociologist and criminologist Richard Moran. They have made children and adults exponentially more afraid of the world.

"He ended up really producing a generation of cautious and afraid kids who view all adults and strangers as a threat to them and it made parents extremely paranoid about the safety of their children," Moran said.

They are in the minority, but there are a number of contrarians out there, such as the founder of Free Range Kids who was thunderstruck by the backlash after she wrote a column on letting her 9-year-old son take the subway home alone. Others like to challenge the sketchy statistics on missing kids and find that kids are actually much safer today.

Lenore Skenazy, the Free Range Kids founder, says parents paralyze their children with an everything-is-dangerous outlook: "... Over-protectiveness is a danger in and of itself. A child who thinks he can't do anything on his own eventually can't."

But the problem with not being overprotective is that you can’t help but think about all the guilt Reve Walsh must be feeling ever since that horrible day 27 years ago. Knowing that in the five minutes she turned away to let her son play with an in-store video game must gnaw at her, especially in the wee hours of the morning. To know that her son would be 33 years old, a young man in a career with a family perhaps. To know that even though you love your other three children with all your heart, there is always an emptiness there. To know that if you just hadn't turned away for five minutes ...

So let's look at the middle ground. You can and should encourage your kids to be independent and take risks, learn how to do "dangerous" things like use a knife, build a fire, navigate traffic on a bike, and they can do those things with you looking on -- at first. But if done right, you can eventually give them a knife and walk away. But you also have to take reasonable precautions such as theme park safety. No doubt some parents, in their quest to keep their kids safe, fail to teach them how to safely navigate the world on their own.

-- Sharon Kennedy Wynne and Sherry Robinson

A preschooler-sized food pyramid

Stressed by your toddler's eating habits? Can't imagine the little one is surviving on what he eats? Certain he's destined for an adult bad diet because he's not eating enough of the right foods now?

There's help! My Pyramid for Preschoolers is a new nutritional Web tool from the U.S. Department of Agriculture designed for children ages 2 to 5. The program lets you build a food pyramid specific to your child's age, gender and level of physical activity, helping you balance the food groups and the portions,  and offering advice on making new choices attractive to your picky person.

For example, I entered my 3-year-old daughter, who is active probably 30-60 minutes a day. The recommendation is a 1,200-calorie diet of: 4 ounces of grains, 1.5 cups of vegetables, 1 cup of fruits, 2 cups of milk and 3 ounces of meat and beans. This is a general guide not meant to be enforced exactly, as the site recognizes the varying factors in children.

But from there you can get menu plans, snack ideas, tips for picky eaters and much, much more. It's a veritable playground for the frustrated parent.

And for those of us who constantly barter with a picky eater, or the under-eater, there's a section called, "Phrases that HELP and HINDER."  Not surprisingly, I see too many of my go-to lines in the HINDER section.

Check it out and share your stories with us.

-- Amy Hollyfield

Angelina Jolie gives kid a knife (and you should too)

In the upcoming November issue of W, Angelina Jolie talks about sharing her love of knives with her son, letting 7 year old Maddox buy daggers. She emphasizes that the knife blades are dulled so they’re not dangerous, and that the purchases are accompanied by discussions about violence. Still, some horrified blog moms are aghast. It doesn't help that there's always a creepy undertone to Jolie's fixation on sharp objects. She wore a vial of Billy Bob Thorton's blood around her neck and has been open about her past as a cutter, someone who deliberately draws blood as a way of dealing with emotional trauma.

The idea of handing over a hack saw to a first grader may seem out there. But some far less wackadoo parents say it's a good thing to let your kids do dangerous stuff like use a knife, build a fire or ride their bike alone to school. It gives you a chance to teach them how to spot the dangers and how to dodge them. In other words, how to grow up.

Gever Tulley is the founder of The Tinkering School, a summer program where kids are provided with and encouraged to explore, build things and learn about danger. He has a short video here where he makes the case that children should make a fire, own a pocket knife, throw a spear, deconstruct appliances and drive a car. He thinks we are cutting off kids from valuable opportunities to learn how to be creative, confident and in control of the environment with all our hovering and cushioned table corners.

Then if you are really in a mood for some lecturing about helicopter parents, check out Free Range Kids. This site was founded by the New York writer who let her 9 year old take the subway home alone armed with only a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill and several quarters in case he had to make a call (she didn't want him to lose her cell phone).  The outrage was thunderous. Read her essay on why she did it and what the backlash was like to get an eye opener.

I have to admit to my own helicopter tendencies, which first got challenged when the Cub Scouts wanted my second grader to get a pocket knife and learn how to build a fire. That's when I realized all the "dangerous" things I did as a kid, like walk to school in second grade, babysit at age 11, and ride a bike all over the neighborhood when I was 8.

I can't say I'm entirely easing up yet, but I'm trying. I think I can let my 10 year old stay home alone while I run to the store. I let him ride his bike around the neighborhood unattended. He has a pocketknife. But I'm not letting him loose on public transportation and no way, no how is he getting the keys to my car, even when he does have a license.

-- Sharon Kennedy Wynne.