FAUX REAL THO

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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