Parenting Archives • FAUX REAL THO

FAUX REAL THO

The Ideological Battlefield of Motherhood

This interview by Anne Helen Petersen with researcher and writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton covers a lot of what makes me cringe whenever I see what makes a good/bad parent debated on social media. With the rise of pop therapy memes, it’s become a regular thing for folks to express and pick apart the many traumas we…

Riding Bikes With a Teenager

There are so many pieces out there about riding with young kids, but not many about riding with older kids, so when I started riding with my older child, a young teenager, I felt like we were on the steep end of the learning curve. The Big Kid learned to ride a bike when he…

Riding Bikes with a Toddler

If you’ve considered riding bikes with a toddler, you know the needs and options for outfitting yourself for a ride can be overwhelming. When wee Baby Cletus turned about a year old, I located a helmet that fit her head and promptly began sourcing iBerts on Craigslist. I liked the idea a lot — baby…

Does Baby Einstein Help or Harm Children?

Last time [writing at Feministe in 2007–ed] I wrote a long entry on some of the spurious advertising techniques made to push products on children under the age of five. Since then, a major study was released suggesting that many of the educational videos aimed at very young children not only have limited to no educational…

Marketing Elmo’s World

As companies further develop methods to perfect brand identification and market to target demographics, some controversy has been stirred in recent years over marketing aimed at children — if one should do it, what age groups can one ethically target, and how. Children don’t usually balance the checkbook, we know, so what can companies do to inspire…

The Ideological Battlefield of Motherhood

Riding Bikes With a Teenager

Riding Bikes with a Toddler

Does Baby Einstein Help or Harm Children?

Marketing Elmo’s World

On Having Goals