blogs: Let's talk about family life 

Surely, you've heard that Big Bird and his friends have turned 40. There's been plenty of both low-brow and high-minded things written about it. The New York Times, as usual, did a complete job with the subject matter. Their story documented how, over the years, Sesame Street lost some of its grime and cookie obsession and gained some princess fantasy and corporate sponsorship. As with all of us, there is good and bad in aging. But while others explore the history of children's television, I want to lament the loss of one particular kind of children's television -- the family hour. If you don't remember that phrase, you can get a history of it from the Museum of Broadcast Communications. The basic point is that there was once a time when shows that aired at 8 p.m. Eastern (7 p.m. Central) were supposed to be appropriate for parents and children to watch together. It has obviously been long forgotten. But I was reminded of it recently when reading about the BBC series, Robin Hood, which is good campy fun. A major character dies at one point, and commentators noted a laughable lack of blood in the scene because it aired in the UK before the "watershed hour." (Which is their less aptly named version of the family hour.) I suddenly realized that I probably could watch Robin Hood with my kids. There were a couple of scenes early on that were a bit grim, (and my children are quite young) but overall.... maybe. This is startling! Because in vast world of American television, a place that includes Lost and Glee and Law and Order and Bones and Vl and Mad Men, there's not a single show I can think of that I'd consider unobjectional for younger children. This actually is part of the appeal of "reality tv." American Idol and The Amazing Race are (sometimes only marginally) appropriate viewing for kids. When I was kid, I watched The Waltons with my parents. And Little House on the Prairie. There was a show about a paramedic crew and The Hardy Boys. I suspect some of those shows have moments that would make me cringe now. Kids probably engaged in fistfights for sport and men probably did sexist and annoying stuff. But at least by the standards of the time, it was the sort of thing that a 7-year-old could watch with her mom. (As opposed to Sesame Street, which is the sort of thing you watch while your mom is, very happily, doing something else.) Certainly, the genie is out of the bottle on this issue. We are never going to have a "family hour," designated by time again, and ... who cares? I don't watch ANYTHING when it is actually aired anyway. I don't think all shows need to be sanitized for children. I don't even think most shows do. Children, like the rest of us, don't need to be watching that much tv anyway. But in the entire glut of bad programing coming out of Hollywood these days, can they really not make one show where everyone keeps their clothes on and no one dissects dead bodies. Just one show?

Credit: Richard Termine

ADD A COMMENT

	frogbert   thu nov 19 2009 at 4:47 pm         ·  My son and i spend an hour each night watching "Family Guy" and "My Name is Earl" before we play GTA IV where we kill all those hookers and dope dealers. He quit watching Sesame Street when he was 5 because Bert and Ernie made him uncomfortable.
	Keith   thu nov 19 2009 at 10:31 pm         ·  I'm sure that is true, Frog. Now back to the gutter with you.
	flexible!   fri nov 20 2009 at 6:31 am         ·  that made me think of my sister and I calling out from our beds at 9:05 pm after we went to bed, fresh from watching the Waltons... "Good night April, Good night Jeff, Good Night John Boy! Good Night Mary Ellen!: - thanks for the memory.. I guess Sponge Bob is our "family hour" show - it is innocent if a bit off-kilter..
	Beverly Bartlett   fri nov 20 2009 at 2:18 pm         ·  A lot of people have suggested animated shows -- Family Guy, Sponge Bob, etc. I know animated shows are sophisticated and "grown-up" now, but I still just have a thing about them. I can not defend this. I know it is irrational.

Thanksgiving is next week and, presumably, you know by now where you'll be eating that day. Or at the very least, whom you'll be eating with. But if you're like a lot of people, the decision about when and where you'll celebrate the first of the celebrations we collectively call "the holidays" was based on factors that had little, if anything to do, with what you actually wanted. Instead, you had conversations about how last year you ate with your husband's family on Thursday, so this year you really ought to get to eat with your own family. But, alas, your brother is working on T-day, so your family is celebrating Thanksgiving on Friday. Which is really inconvenient, because your teen-age son was going to try to snag a good deal on a Wii Friday morning and, also, because your ex-husband has custody of your daughter that day. But if you go to your mom's on the actual Thanksgiving day, she's only going to have stew, because she's saving the turkey for your brother. (!?) Besides, you really need to go to your mother-in-law's because she hasn't forgiven you for bailing on Christmas brunch last year, because that was going to be her last chance to get the whole family together before your sister-in-law got stationed in Hawaii. So you need to do better this year, or it'll only go to show that you don't really care about family, or at least not about your husband's family. So there. Thanksgiving at the in-laws. Whew! The whole thing is complicated enough even if you only have intact nuclear families who all live in the same general metro area. But hardly anyone has that, so it's more complicated still. If you've got to fly the family to LA, or even just drive them to Chicago, it makes it really hard to split your meal among several houses, even on two different days. Complicated is not always bad. Sometimes, we make the mistake of pretending that our lives are so much more intricately busy and burdensome than prior lives. For my part of it, I can put up with a lot of "busy family life" negotiations in exchange for little niceties like not having to butcher my own turkey and not having to cook the thing with wood that I chopped myself. Furthermore, every time I find myself feeling like "everyone wants a part of me," I remind myself of the years I had nowhere to go on Thanksgiving, when I was young and single and living in a new city. Having lots of people wanting to celebrate with you? That's a good problem. The challenge of Thanksgiving is the challenge of the whole season, and in some ways, of life itself. It's about learning how to accept what is possible, and what is not, and to chose one of the possible options and live with it. Sometimes, you just have to decide that you don't care what anyone thinks of your decision, or at the very least you don't care what some people think of your decision. So what did you decide?

Public Domain Pictures.net

ADD A COMMENT

If idle hands are the devil's workshop, then an idling engine is surely the devil's ginormous, ugly, surreal oil refinery glistening against the night sky. In modern engines, idling for as little as 10 seconds is a net waste of gas. That means, yes, that if you're inching forward in a carpool line picking your child up from school, you could stop the car each time you move forward and improve air quality, extend the earth's resources and save yourself money at the gas pump. You'd think sensible people would file that under the category of "good to know," especially since, as we discussed yesterday, children don't walk to school anymore. But judging by some of the early reaction to a CJ story about the mayor considering a proposal to restrict idling, you'd think idling was a cherished activity along the lines of eating apple pie and saluting the flag. It's dumb, idiotic, a hardship on "honest" people and promoted by "wackos" like PETA, according to some of those responding. (Which, I'm not defending PETA, but what do they have to do with this?) It also, they say, would be unenforceable and, yet, enforced so rigorously as to generate lots of money for the greedy mayor and his greedy friends. It would lead to anarchy, because people would murder each other while police are distracted by writing up tickets for idling. It's hard to argue with all those well-reasoned points, which remind me of the well-reasoned arguments against requiring seat belts and car seats and banning drunk driving. And, oh yeah, setting speed limits. (One little fringe benefit of growing older is that you realize that people have just been having the exact same arguments forever, a fact that is simultaneously reassuring and depressing.) What the people making the high-minded arguments choose to ignore is the actual facts presented in the story. One eye-grabbing quote: One study by the air district completed last year examined Norton Elementary School on Brownsboro Road as parents lined up to pick up their children. It found levels of benzene, a human carcinogen found in gasoline and car exhaust, shot up as cars idled in queue. Here's a question: Why do you want to defend a practice that wastes money, wastes resources and puts poison in the air? The story also noted that anti-idling laws exist in 100 cities or states so far, with no reported increase in communist party membership. (Ok, I made up the last part, but come on.) I don't think it's a huge stretch of the imagination to think that a well-publicized law against idling would get a pretty high compliance rate in places like the Norton Elementary car pool line, without a serious diversion of resources from murder investigations. But whatevs. If you don't like the idea of having a law about idling cars, here's an idea: You could easily make it unnecessary by: turning off your car.

Public Domain Pictures.net

ADD A COMMENT  ·  1 MORE COMMENTS, VIEW THEM ALL

	Rick Redding   tue nov 17 2009 at 10:37 am         ·  darn right. and all those parents could also make their kids ride the bus instead of wasting their time and gas picking them up in cars.
	GtownGuy   tue nov 17 2009 at 11:36 am         ·  Either ban drive-thru windows or charge a huge annual licensing fee. **I should not be FORCED to breathe and see the pollutants & fumes spewed into our air by lazy or arrogant or just-plain-dumb gas- or diesel-wasting disrespectful individuals.** Idling in front of my house actually disrupts my reception of over-the-air TV reception - which makes me crankier than normal. YES - I WALKED to school, except in the most inclement weather. In fact, I also WALKED HOME FOR LUNCH for over 4 years at my first (neighborhood!) elementary school.
	chuck   tue nov 17 2009 at 2:12 pm         ·  Beverly, it's so simple. If you could only see through those rose-colored, Janis Joplin glasses of yours you would understand... This is 'Murica! And in 'Murica, we do what we want. And more to the point, we don't have to listen to any of this dumb environmental bullshit put out by a socialist government intent on taking away my guns, and pass me another big mac, thankyouverymuch. God gave us the earth to do with as we please and damn it, I'm going to shit on as much of it as possible before my time is up. Got it, you damn hippie? ;-) Best, - C
	VeggieMomster   tue nov 17 2009 at 3:39 pm         ·  Oh, the LOLs at Chuck's comment... He essentially said what I was going to, with much more glorious sarcasm. There's an infectious sense of entitlement in, um, "'Murica", and as long as we pay for something, we think we can do with it whatever we like. We constantly waste water, electricity, food, and gas. We're richer than we realize, we waste with reckless abandon, and then whine about the cost of living. We don't respect the things we buy, the money we earn, or the planet that has to first sustain us, then sustain all of our waste. Essentially, we're all wading in our own waste. Go hippies!
	Stevietheman   thu nov 19 2009 at 8:47 pm         ·  The best argument against it is that this idea, while seemingly logical, is also a case of government overreach if law enforcement or IPL is involved. All the people who complain about government getting all into their lives would actually be given a golden example to hold up, and this would negatively affect our ability to have government work on much more critical matters. I think most would be sanguine with an all-out education effort, which would also be much less expensive to administer.

Fall is always a nice time to walk and perhaps never more than this perfectly turned-out year. So probably you've been noticing the groups of neighborhood children enjoying leisurely walks home from school in the afternoon, playing kick the can or dragging a stick along the fence. Ha! Of course, you're not seeing that. Hardly anyone walks to school anymore. In some neighborhoods, students barely even walk home from the bus stop! Instead, two times a day, clusters of cars sit idling at bus stops, where children eventually emerge from buses to get immediately into cars, breathing only the idle exhaust in the few seconds that they're outside. (Read more about the yuck factor of idling cars here.) There's a combination of reasons for this. The list includes laziness, a student assignment plans that mean fewer students live close enough to walk, public policy decisions that have left many neighbors without sidewalks along busy roads, increasingly complicated family patterns and schedules, and, of course, fears of abduction. And it's not just about getting to and from school, the nicely done blog called Free Range Kids writes about people who are scared to let their children get the mail at the end of the driveway, or walk to a neighbors house. Even playing in the backyard, alone, can be frightening for modern parents. Earlier this year, The New York Times wrote about the trend away from walking to school, focusing mostly on the abduction issue. (It was tied to the then-recent news about Jacycee Dugard's release from captivity, which reminded parents of why, exactly, they were so fearful.) As you would expect, the newspaper dutifully reported that parental fears were way overblown, that the risks of stranger abduction was actually quite small. Although they did so partly with bogus statistics. At one point, for example, they reported that only 115 children are kidnapped each year, while 250,000 are injured in car accidents. This is, on its face, a laughable comparison. Among other things, while no one wants their child to be injured in a car accident, whiplash is better than being kidnapped. Nevertheless, the larger point is quite right. The long-term health risks of the lifestyle we're teaching our children, where they take cars everywhere and rarely go around the block without supervision, are surely more likely to occur than the very small chance of abduction. Most thoughtful parents don't like the way our current style of supervision undermines the growing sense of independence and autonomy that children of previous generations had, when they rode their bikes around the neighborhood looking for new kids to invite to a pickup ball game. (Or whatever.) Still,there's an aspect of the equation that doesn't get looked at enough. When children of my generation roamed the neighborhood, hardly anyone had central air and few women worked outside the home. The neighborhood was full of kids, yes. And it was also full of women, who could hear a cry for help through the screen window, or who might spot a problem brewing while she was hanging clothes on the line. In many neighborhoods now, a kid roaming the neighborhood would be, really and truly, alone. That is the state of things now and if we want to address this issue sensitively, we need to start with that recognition.

Public Domain Pictures.net

ADD A COMMENT

Rick Redding   mon nov 16 2009 at 12:00 pm         ·  in my neighborhood, I saw a Mom actually drive a middle school kid literally four houses down to the corner to catch the bus and then drive home. In nice weather. This was not more than 100 yards. Kids can, and should, walk more to get places.

PhoenixFellow   mon nov 16 2009 at 3:17 pm         ·  Kids will never feel obligated to walk as long as adults depend on cars as their means of transportation without even considering walking. What are teens looking to get the first chance they get their license? A car for themselves. I'm the oldest one left in my neighborhood's generation of kids, at least I remember and cherish those times we got the whole crew together to play kickball or toss the frisbee around. I know exactly where you're coming from as recently as the 90's.