We don't go to too many baseball games in this household. I rarely pack up the family and head to Madison Square Garden, either, to take in a friendly game of basketball ... or one of them rock and roll concert shows that the kids like so much these days.

Also, we don't drink too many things out of a bottle around here that aren't scotch, wine, beer, seltzer or milk. Roughly in that order of importance.

So it's a good thing that I read this cautionary tale about a poor clueless Ann Arbor dad who took his 7-year old to a Tigers game and bought him a Mike's Hard Lemonade—which apparently contains delicious alcohol—who knew?! You see where this is going: dude finds himself face to face with the cops ... while his son is rushed to the hospital! And then foster care!! Oy. Note to self: remember to read labels on bottles real careful—like when my kid is old enough to attend the Hannah Montana comeback tour.

And here I thought we were only supposed to treat our tourists this way ...

Want to stir up a little ridiculous controversy that serves only to underscore your central point (that parents today be cra-zay)? New York Sun columnist Lenore Skenazy has the recipe for you.

Step 1. Let your 9-year-old son ride the subway all by himself under the theory that parents today are waaaay to overprotective. ("I gave him a subway map, a MetroCard, a $20 bill, and several quarters, just in case he had to make a call.")
Step 2.  Write an excellent, thoughtful column about it. "Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them."
Step 3. Let simmer on the interblogs.
Step 4. Serve hot-headed.

Skenazy is totally on to something here. The over-propensity among parents (usually Of a Certain Means) to hover and helicopter over their kiddies' every move is a serious bugaboo of mine (awful stroller pun intended, sadly). But more importantly it does the kids a disservice. The real world is not a baby-proofed, rounded-corner, anti-bacterial rubber room. Thank God. So why raise kids as if it were? They'll be sorely disappointed. (As it is they're going to have to grapple with the fact that they're not the Specialest Little People on Earth they've been told their entire childhoods, but that's another source of irritation for another time).

Now Skenazy has now bequeathed the Internets with a special gift: Free Range Kids (LOVE the name). A snip of her blog's mission statement: "At Free Range, we believe in safe kids. We believe in helmets, car seats and safety belts. We do NOT believe that every time school age children go outside, they need a security detail. Most of us grew up Free Range and lived to tell the tale. Our kids deserve no less."

The blog's first post was April 1 and there's only been one more since, which does not inspire great confidence that this brilliant idea will yield an especially robust site. But we'll reserve judgment for now.

As founder of the Tinkering School, Gever Tulley fully admits to the fact that he puts "power tools in the hands of second graders." He also delivered an excellent talk at the TED conference last year: 5 dangerous things you should let your kid do. What, pray tell, are these five things? I'm so glad you asked:

1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
4.5 Break the Digital Millennium Copyright Act
5. Drive a car

"trust me, they're going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys." Watch and learn.

Apparently some 3-year-olds are more advanced than others. Mine, for example, has trouble sorting out the differences between "today" and "next week" and "my birthday." For her, it's all a blur.

Other kids, however, are all up to date on the latest on the gubernatorial crisis in Albany. Watch this clip: here we learn that "everybody at school is talking about" the Eliot Spitzer scandal. You know, the one in which he paid $80,000 for his friend, Kristen, who was on the show "The Girl is Wild." The poor governor had to quit before he was peached.

New York City kids are some sophisticated tykes, I tell you what. Still. Personally, I prefer the rehash of Star Wars. Something about coaching a little girl to describe Hookergate smacks of trying a wee bit too hard to get a laugh.

Newsweek's very own Claudia Kalb reports on a controversial and flawed new study about spanking. The money paragraph, as it were:

One stat: the 25 percent of university students who ranked highest on a corporal punishment scale insisted on sex without a condom, compared with the 12.5 percent of university students who scored lowest on the scale. Another: 75 percent of college students who'd been spanked a lot said they were sexually aroused by masochistic sex, compared with 40 percent of students who were never spanked.

So, yeah. Spanking turns your kids into sluts. Good to know.

Lord have mercy. I want to interview the father of this young lady so i can do everything he did in raising her. He must be so very, very proud. Is 2-and-a-half too young to start in with the electric piano lessons and FM classic rock saturation? I mean, seriously, this is incredible. It's like she's from the past and the future both at the same time:

Sometime I, Breeder provocatrix Jessica Bennett writes in this week's NEWSWEEK about retouching your tyke's school pix:

We've all looked back on grade-school photos and wondered, "What in God's name was I thinking?" For me it started with buckteeth and hair-sprayed bangs-a true child of the '80s. Then came the braces, stringy hair and oversize Kurt Cobain T-shirt, the tween years of Seattle grunge. High school wasn't actually that long ago, but I'm sure whatever it was I wore will be grossly unfashionable by the time my 10-year reunion hits.

The grade-school class portrait is a time capsule of sorts-a bittersweet reminder of forgotten cowlicks, blemishes and crooked teeth. Awkward, at least in retrospect, is awfully cute. So it's sad to think those mortifying school snapshots might soon be a thing of the past. A growing number of photo agencies and a horde of Web sites now offer retouching for kids to wipe their every imperfection clean: powdering complexions, whitening teeth, erasing braces or freckles. And parents are signing up their kids at younger and younger ages.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE
 

The New York Times magazine's cover story today couldn't be better timed. It is Toy Fair weekend, after all, so what better moment than to ask "why do we play, anyway?" What is play? What are the evolutionary benefits to play? Is it essential? Are there any drawbacks to play? The growing body of research is still largely inconclusive, but I did like the article's conclusion:

"Animal findings about how play influences brain growth suggest that playing, though it might look silly and purposeless, warrants a place in every child’s day. Not too overblown a place, not too sanctimonious a place, but a place that embraces all styles of play and that recognizes play as every bit as essential to healthful neurological development as test-taking drills, Spanish lessons or Suzuki violin."

Amen to that. Three cheers to unstructured, ABC-free play.

Gaming the System: Choose videogames that adapt to your child’s skills. Getty Images

By Anna Kuchment and Christina Gillham

Parents who feel guilty about letting their kids watch TV might breathe a sigh of relief after talking to Deborah Linebarger. Linebarger, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication who studies the effects of media on young children, has let all her kids watch some TV from the time they were babies. “There’s evidence now that certain kinds of programming can help kids with language development and can be beneficial in moderation,” she says.

Some studies have linked TV and videogames with obesity and attention-deficit disorders. And the American Academy of Pediatrics says kids younger than 2 shouldn’t watch any television at all. But, despite these warnings, 90 percent of 2-year-olds regularly watch TV, DVDs or videos, and one third of 3- to 6-year-olds have a TV in their bedroom. So child-development experts have turned their attention to helping parents make smart choices. A growing body of research shows that, if parents select programming wisely, set time limits and watch with their kids as much as possible, children are likely to benefit rather than suffer any negative consequences. “I don’t think TV screens for any age should be dealt with as something toxic,” says Dr. Michael Rich, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Boston and director of its Center on Media and Child Health (cmch.tv). Some advice on helping your children navigate the video landscape:

Ages 0 to 2.“There’s nothing better for infants’ development than human interaction,” says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington and coauthor of “The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work for Your Kids.” Last year Christakis coauthored a study that found a correlation between baby video and DVD viewing and poor language development in babies ages 8 to 16 months. But Linebarger says to follow your kid’s cues. If your child seems interested in TV, an 11- to 12-minute episode of a commercial-free show like Nickelodeon’s “Blue’s Clues” or PBS’s “Arthur” is unlikely to do harm and could help him learn new words. Preliminary research by Rebekah Richert, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, shows that babies as young as 18 months are capable of learning new words from DVDs like Baby Einstein’s “Baby Wordsworth” as long as “parents direct their children’s attention to the screen and label particular words.”

Ages 2 to 5. In Linebarger’s research, watching such programs as Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer” and “Blue’s Clues” and PBS’s “Arthur,” “Clifford” and “Dragon Tales” was linked with increased vocabulary in kids ages 6 months to 2½ years, while such shows as PBS’s “Teletubbies” were linked with decreased vocabulary. Choose programs with a linear plotline, as opposed to a variety-show format, because they’re easier for toddlers to follow.

Ages 6 to 10. “There’s not as much programming for kids once they start school that’s of high quality,” says Christakis. But kids in this age group are not yet ready for prime-time TV, and parents will need to hunt around for more-appropriate content. Prescreen as much as possible to make sure the show you’re watching is teaching your child the same values you are, and check review sites like parentschoice .org or commonsensemedia.org. Linebarger also recommends documentary-style shows on the History Channel and the Discovery Channel. Michael Levine, executive director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, a new organization dedicated to improving the educational content of digital media, says to limit screen time to one hour per day, discuss TV shows and games with your kids after they’ve viewed them, and read daily with them for at least 20 minutes. As with nutrition, a healthy media diet is all about balance.

Let this be a warning to you, tourists: don't get sick in New York City!

Consider the plight of Yvonne Bray of Devon, England. Good single mum that she is, Yvonne brought her daughters Gemma and Katie, along on a four day holiday to the Big Apple—and then promptly fell ill. Pneumonia! Oh noes! So the hotel manager called 911 and she was taken to Elmhurst Medical Center. Good move, right?

Well, her kids were left in the care of social workers. Who sent them to a municipal orphanage! Where they were treated like prisoners (asked what gangs they belong to, strip searched, given medical exams). The girls were sprung from the jug and returned to their mum (who didn't know where they were being kept) after one scary, hairy night. Read about it here.

Wait a second, orphanage? Let me guess, it's right around the corner from the debtor's prison. And half the tykes in there are crack pickpockets. Is this 1846? Are we sure Yvonne had pneumonia and not, say, dropsy or rickets or the fainting-away-disease? WTF?

Oh, but it gets more awesome. Upon their return home, Yvonne Bray received a letter from Administration for Children's Services informing her that they were investigating her for child neglect! Because, apparently, she had the the cruel and neglectful idea to catch pneumonia and be hospitalized. What does ACS have to say for themselves? "Children's Services assisted a mother whose children could not remain safe by themselves in a country that was strange to them."

As it happens I have a good friend who worked in the city's department of child protective services for many years. I asked him if this sounded at all plausible to him. His response:

"Yeah, sure. Lesson: don't get admitted to the hospital as a tourist if you are the only caregiver for some minors who are with you. Or at least never agree to let ACS take your kids. I would probably put most of the fault on the hospital social worker. The SW should have been working much better with the mom ... obviously. Elmhurst hospital is pretty rough." [Indeed, the Evening Standard reports Yvonne was in a ward where "every other patient seemed to be handcuffed to either their bed or a cop--the man in the next bed had been stabbed in the neck." This sounds shockingly like the maternity floor at the hospital my daughter was born in, actually.]

My friend also reminded me that this is the same city, after all, where jurors in the Nixzmary Brown murder trial saw crime scene photos of a Father’s Day gift to Cesar Rodriguez from Nixzmary—including a coffee mug that read "World’s Greatest Dad." This was, naturally, offered as evidence that Rodriguez had no reason to hurt Nixzmary. (I hear Charles Manson called his lawyer to reprimand him for not admitting as evidence the "I'm With Stupid" t-shirt he was wearing at the Tate house ... you know, to prove he wasn't the ringleader.)

Wouldn't you just love to meet the lawyer who offers a "World’s Greatest Dad" mug into evidence? How much of his soul do you think died that day?

This gets funnier with each subsequent viewing. Of course by "funny" I mean "a suicidally depressing reminder of how lame I have become." Watch, learn, love and live with the Breeder.