You’ve got to keep asking your kids “how was school today?” even if the answer is almost always “fine.” This week, I asked my fourth-grader how his day was and he said “Weird. A lady who runs a funeral home came and taught us what to do if we get kidnapped and thrown into the trunk of a car.”

Say what?

Had I noticed the email from the school last week, I would have known that the school was hosting a special visitor,  a representative of an abduction prevention program sponsored nationally by the Dignity Memorial network of funeral providers.  According to the overlooked email (gee, how did that happen?) the program aims to “empower children and their parents by teaching them how to recognize, avoid and escape potentially dangerous situations.”

I appreciate how challenging it must be for funeral homes to find appropriate public service/marketing opportunities, but isn’t it a little creepy for kids to learn about safety from a funeral director?

But what really bothered me as I listened to my son’s account of the program was the extremity of it. It’s hard to know when common sense safety lessons cross over and become alarmist fear-mongering, but I’d say it’s probably when you switch from talking about what to do when you can’t find your parents in the supermarket to how to locate a wire and cut it so you can disable the car that is speeding you to your doom while you are trapped in the trunk. continue »

A suburban Dallas school district has suspended a 4-year-old from his prekindergarten class because he wears his hair too long and does not want his parents to cut it. via Boy, 4, Chooses Long Locks and Is Suspended From Class – NYTimes.com.

What is it with adults and long hair? I’ve blogged about this before, wondering (and getting wildly divergent responses) when a child is old enough to choose his/her own hairstyle. Now we have parents supporting a boy’s penchant for long, curly hair while the school district says no way, it’s too distracting. The double standard is obvious here; I’m sure there are girls in the class with long, curly, distracting hair who have not been told to chop it off.

In our house, the battle rages on. Our middle school son loves his hair long — and stringy and greasy. I don’t mind the long hair, if he would just wash it properly. He is showering at the moment and I swear if I weren’t occupied at the computer I would not be able to resist sticking my arms behind the shower curtain and giving his head a proper scrub. His hair is super thick, but it’s still somewhat miraculous (not in a good way, obviously) how he manages to come out of a long shower and shampoo with hair that is still stringy and greasy.

My son thinks his hair looks awesome. I don’t want to undermine his confidence at his tender pre-adolescent age but there are days when he truly has a face/head that only a mother could love. What to do? Let him be until the hormones kick in and he suddenly cares what he looks like? Lop it off? Give him a hat? I think that last option would be against school policy. Too distracting.

I can’t imagine criticizing the actions of any mother in the moments after her child dies, but apparently a lot of people are taking issue with a Florida woman named Shellie Ross who tweeted her more than 5,400 followers a half hour after her two-year-old son was found at the bottom of her pool.

Not long after that, a firestorm erupted on Twitter, with strangers wondering what kind of mother tweets during a crisis. The debate has been going on for days around the Internet, with critics calling Ross callous (and suggesting that if she had been paying as much attention to her child as she had to her Twitter account, her son would not have come to harm) and supporters (many who know her in real life, and others who have never met her) describing her as a caring mother who reached out to her virtual community during a tragedy. Announcing a Child’s Death on Twitter – Motherlode Blog – NYTimes.com.

My heart goes out to Ross, a military mom with a popular blog, mostly because of her tragic loss but also because she is, as noted on the Motherlode, experiencing the dark side of opening up to a virtual “community.” Even in moments of utter despair and misfortune, people who don’t know you or even read your posts will not hesitate to use their anonymity to take you down.

Spend more time as a family. Eat dinner together. Go on vacation, even if the best you can do is turn off the phone and hunker down together in the den. It seems like you can’t pick up a newspaper or community flier or women’s magazine without being told that nothing is better for kids than hanging out with their family.

Why, then, do we allow athletic coaches — often in the same schools that are espousing more family time — to ask — nay, demand — that parents forgo a family vacation so their children can get in more  practice time? A woman I know whose son plays on his high school basketball team is determined not to be badgered. Her family is a third of the way through their project to travel to every state in America. Next up are Louisiana, Arkansas and Mississippi, which they plan to visit during Christmas break. The coach doesn’t want the boy to go. The family is sticking with their plan, but not without a lot of tension and guilt.The mother of another boy on the team wants to take him skiing, but the boy is too scared to miss a practice.

Is it fair to ask parents and kids to make these kinds of choices? I know some parents who refuse to let their children miss a practice or a game, saying that it’s an important life lesson to know that when you sign up for a team it means that you keep your commitments to the team. But shouldn’t we honor our commitments to our families, too?

Image by striatic via Flickr

As if wrapping yet another gift and having nine people for Hannukah dinner tonight weren’t enough, I just took a break for a wee bit more masochism and read two articles (here and here) about how overblown and present-laden this minor Jewish holiday has become here in America, where we all know that Happy Holidays really means Merry Christmas.

I know full well that Hannukah has become too commercial and too much like Christmas. But here’s the thing: I don’t care. Having grown up in a wishy-washy sort of Jewish family that some years celebrated Hannukah and some years exchanged presents on Christmas morning, I’m just happy that my children know “from whence they come” (to borrow a phrase from Adelaide in the very Christian musical “Guys and Dolls”).

It’s not easy being a Jewish child in December, especially in a town that has an official tree lighting and a visit from Santa at the village hall. My younger son has mentioned more than once how envious he is of his “half and half” friends who celebrate Christmas and Hannukah. It’s not just the present tally that makes him (ever)green, it’s the whole spectacle of the holiday.

Our Hannukah may be less than “pure,” meaning that my kids get more than chocolate money as gifts. But by lighting candles, eating latkes and gathering with family, we are celebrating our own religious freedom and our decision not to assimilate. If that is accompanied by unwrapping a long-desired toy or even a new (mon dieu!) video game, it doesn’t make it any less important.