Just some random stuff today.
* Anna flew for the first time this Labor Day weekend. She was a gem. She slept during both takeoffs and landings and only got cranky when she was bored.
It was actually a lot of fun to watch the faces of people who were on our flight. I could see them praying that Anna wasn’t on their flight. I can only imagine that that is how my face looked during my pre-Anna days.
* I’ve been told by many grandparents that the strongest type of love in the world is grand-parental love. Turns out they knew what they were talking about. Seeing my mother with my daughter really gave me the feeling that a) I didn’t exist and b) if something happened to Miranda and me, my mother would fight tooth and nail for custody of Anna. I can’t decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
* Anna is on the verge of crawling, which means she’s starting “humping” the floor. She’s also teething, which means lots of drool. As cute as this is, seeing her do both at the time isn’t something any father should have to witness.
And finally…
A study to be published in the September issue of Pediatrics and led by Robert John Hancox of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand found a positive relationship between watching television as an adolescent and having attention disorders. Put another way, the more boob tube your kid watches, the more likely he is to need Ritalin.
Read the study if you want, but according to the write-up of the article on MSN.com, the message is simple:
“The take-home message, Hancox concluded, is that parents should heed the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, which say that children under two should watch no television at all, and that children over the age of two should watch no more than two hours per day — recommendations that are in line with his findings.”
There’s a problem, though. The study is flawed because, “as a correlational study, it says nothing at all about causation. In that sense, it cannot answer a key question: Does TV viewing cause kids’ attention problems, or do the parents of children with attention problems drop them in front of the TV more often to keep them occupied?”
Moreover, “the study makes no distinctions about what the children are watching, how much they are paying attention, and so on.”
In my humble, non-scientific opinion, if a kid’s watching two-plus hours of television a night, attention disorders are just one of several that the kid’s parents should be concerned about.
Filed under: children, family, fatherhood, humor, kids, life, love, marriage, parenting, relationships
