“Cricket” magazine started chirping about the same time as Paul & Andy Cantrell did. When I saw it for the first time, I was struck not only by the lively intelligence of the magazine, but by its assumption that it was addressing itself to other lively intelligences.

André Carus, and the publishing company that has grown up around Cricket magazine, stay true to that. Some companies seem to say, “This is for smart kids.” Cricket products always seem to say “You’re a kid, so you’re smart. You like a challenge, and you can sense the difference between real fun and mindless pablum.” I like that point of view.

The last catalog I have from Cricket is for Fall, 2005. I hope you can still request the same one; it has that classic picture of a developing reader: a child reading by flashlight under the blanket.

Cricket

‘Tis the season to spend money, so you might as well get some good stuff for kids!

We’re going to list some of our favorite outfitters over the next couple weeks. Here in RiverTown, “outfitter” usually means any parent resource – anyone who provides useful concepts, counsel, or materials to Grow With the Flow readers. But for now, let’s focus on outfitters who sell good gifts for kids.

By the way, if you have a favorite outfitter along those lines, mention them in a comment or drop me a note and I’ll try to get them posted here in RiverTown News.

Shop On!

Are you new to the world of blogs and forums? I hope these instructions will help you participate in this web site.

How To Post

You can post at two different locations: You can add a comment to an article posted on RiverTown News, our blog, or you can join in conversation with other readers in the Coffee Shop, our forum. Usually, the Coffee Shop is where you want to be. RiverTown News comments are more like letters to the editor – specific disagreements with an article, for example. The Coffee Shop is for chatting with other readers about the ideas in Grow With the Flow. Many articles in the News will have a link to a “table” at the Coffee Shop where readers can talk about the article.

You can also get to the Coffee Shop by clicking on RiverTown Coffee Shop at the top of this page. You’ll see a list of “Forums” – general topic areas. Click on one of interest. That will bring you to a page of “Topics.”

If you don’t fancy any of the topics there, you can click on “New Topic” and add one.

If a topic looks interesting, click on it. You may find only my starter message, or you may find a whole series of messages – conversations about the topic. They may be closely linked to each other, or they may be loosely gathered around the topic. At the end of them, you’ll come to a screen that has buttons to either “post reply” or open a “new topic.” (The buttons are also at the top, but it usually makes more sense to read what’s already been posted.)

“Post reply” and “new topic” work almost the same. The only difference between the two is that you need to give a new topic a title. Type your thoughts in the box. If you’re responding to someone, you may want to put their name at the start, as you would in a letter.

RiverTown News has a series of articles, “posts.” You’re reading one of them right now. Click on RiverTown News at the top of the page to see all the posts. The most recent is always at the top of the page; you can scroll down to earlier ones, and then go to previous pages with older and older articles. (Why comment on an older article? Because Google is still reading it, and will lead others to it.)

Every article has a “Comments” button at the end. Find an article where you have something to say, and click on that button. Scroll down through the article; if there are already comments, they now follow it. Read down through them. After the last, there’s a place for you to add yours. Fill in the name you want to use for the post, and your email if you want to, and then just type your message in the blank box. Preview your comment and post it.

Some Suggestions About Posts

• When your comment can tie into Grow With the Flow, great, but if it’s about kids, even if you aren’t sure about the direct tie to the book, go for it!
• Just go ahead and post – you won’t break anything. If something goes funny, drop me a note and I’ll either fix it or call Paul!
• The norm is for short, informal comments, but feel free to make a post of any length, in whatever style is comfortable. People often sign with a first name.
• Whether you’re looking ahead to having kids, commenting on friends’ experience, in the thick of child rearing now, or looking back with accumulated wisdom, you have a contribution to make.
• At first, just type bare-bones messages and post them. If you get into this, you can learn to do all sorts of fancy things with HTML commands, and with all those mysterious buttons on the screen.
• Positive or negative, support or disagreement, mellow or contentious – All that matters is that you post!
• Keep on coming back! And Thanks!

An article in Parents.com titled 5 Values You Should Teach your Child by Age Five lists the values of honesty, justice, determination, consideration, and love.  The article gives some practical examples of interactions between parents and children showing how we do teach kids values by role modeling.

I’ve been talking ("and talking and talking,” some readers will say) about an article by William Doherty, of the University of Minnesota, with the provocative title See How They Run. His theme is that “… for many kids, childhood is becoming a rat race of hyperscheduling, overbusyness, and loss of family time.”

I’ve also said that I think the question is important to Grow With the Flow readers, because I suspect that there are potentially negative cognitive consequences when too much of a child’s time is structured and shaped by adults and adult agendas.

Professor Doherty notes that one of the issues is that there is a prodigious number of activities available to the average kid today. If we, as parents, feel the need to provide every opportunity to our child, the plethora of activities may rob that child of the important cognitive opportunities that grow from self management and independence.

Play a game for me, suggested by the article?

Do some research. Check newspapers, school counselor, friends, bulletin boards, etc., and estimate how many different structured activities your child could join. Before- during- and after-school clubs or programs, city classes and recreation opportunities, athletic or other ongoing programs sponsored by independent organizations, commercial programs to advance any number of goals or skills, church organizations or civic-minded groups: In one grand total, how many opportunities are there?

If you take the time to do the research, take a moment more and add a comment to this article, with your results. (Mention your child’s age, since that may be relevant to the number of activities.)

How many were there when you were a kid? How many can your child possibly do? How do you balance all these great opportunities with research that says our kids are better off eating with their family, hanging out in the back yard, making their own activities? And do you agree? (I’ve heard counters to this argument that say the activites have become a place for families to come together, not be pulled apart.)

The New York Times reviews Top of the Class: How Asian Parents Raise High Achievers – and How You Can Too, by Dr. Soo Kim Abboud and Jane Kim, to be published November 1. It seems mean-spirited of me to complain about a book I haven’t read, but if I wait until it’s published, something else will have knocked it off my list, so…

In “Top of the Class” the Kim sisters advise parents who want successful children to raise them just as the Kims did - in strict households in which parents spend hours every day educating their children, where access to pop culture is limited, and where children are taught that their failures reflect poorly on the family.

Let’s set aside the question of whether “Asian” parents all raise their kids the same way, as well as questions about the uses of the term “Asian-American.” As far as I can tell from the review, the Kim sisters’ argument is a pretty narrow one, something like “If you do what our parents did, your kid will get into the school of your dreams.” Need I say that the review adequately questions this premise?

But the core of the Kim sisters’ apparent argument especially concerns me. I try to picture an American parent following their advice: trying to raise their kids by acting like they think Asian parents would. Parenting comes from a deep, largely unconscious, cultural base. In good parenting, that base is coherent: The parts of it fit together, so that our convictions, our assumptions, our personal history all flow into the smallest action with our child. To try to “act like an Asian parent” seems likely to give about the same results as saying “Hey, let’s play softball, but play it the way we imagine sumo wrestlers would.”

But I wonder: Is it possible that the cross-generational evolution of parenting styles in parents of Asian descent may yield a terrific model for many Americans: one that features good structure and strong expectations without shame, a balance of family and individual goals, and intense parental involvement that nonetheless allows for freedom of choice? I could relate to that.

I was just talking to our next-door neighbors, who were praising the Baby Einstein DVDs. They feel good about the content: stimulating, fun, up-to-date theory backng them, but with a homemade feel.

“Mr. President, I have bad news: Three Brazilian soldiers were killed this week.”

“That’s terrible. But, um, exactly how many is a brazilian?”

I was talking with an immunologist about the coming flu pandemic. He noted that 100,000 units of vaccine on order was a fine idea – from the public relations point of view: “In a worst-case epidemic, if they were 100% effective, they’d reduce the death toll from 150,000,000 to 149,900,000.”

I started reading newspapers during the Eisenhower administration. (I liked Ike.) I’ve watched about a brazilian numbers flash by my visual cortex since then. Many of them were so large as to push the limits of human understanding. Often, the mere number of numbers has overwhelmed my ability to keep on processing their individual relevance. Distressingly many times, the numbers have been designed to confuse or mislead me.

This grumbly line of thought led me back to Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, John Allen Paulos’ classic treatment of the whys and wherefores of bad thinking about numbers. I’ll come back to the approximately 443,00 words of this fine book another day. (Estimated by taking a ten-line sample, multiplying by the number of ten-line units on a page, and multiplying that by the number of pages in the book.) Let me try that again, counting one line and multiplying by the number of lines on that page and then by the 180 pages of the book. Nuts, maybe that was 57,600 words? Ah, what’s an extra zero one way or the other?

This is a spinoff from an article I’ve been talking about by William Doherty, of the University of Minnesota, with the provocative title See How They Run. His theme is that “… for many kids, childhood is becoming a rat race of hyperscheduling, overbusyness, and loss of family time.”

In his article he uses an image that has become important to me in my private practice: He says that parents fear that their children will “be left behind when the achievement train leaves the station.”

I have the privilege of working with a good many twenty-something ex-kids. Some are already done with college and looking at grad school; some are thinking about trying out a community college after a disastrous high school experience. Some are desperately hoping for their first serious relationship, some are married and beginning to imagine having children. Some are still living with their parents while they struggle with “What will I be when I grow up?"; others are five years into a career and wondering if it was the right choice. You get the idea: the most varied of situations.

For a frightening portion of this generation, I’m hearing the same fear, one I’ve come to reflect in a train image. When I present it to my 20-something clients, it seems to resonate for them. I say to them, it’s like you’re telling me:

There’s a train and everyone else is on it, and I’m not. Or maybe I’m on it, but it’s the wrong train and everyone else is at the right station and I’m not. Or maybe it’s the right station, but everyone else got here first and I’m the one who’s behind. ”

Worse than that, as I listen, is my sense that they’re saying

There’s only one train, only one track, only one schedule, only one set of stops, and I don’t even know where the station is, or what the stops are, or when I’m supposed to be there, but I know I’m behind.”

The train image helps, I think, because it lets them giggle a bit at their fear, and start to look at it. Because underneath, they know there are many trains, many stations, many routes to the same destination, many good destinations, and no fixed schedules. The train they thought they missed is what’s missing – it doesn’t exist and never did. And if that’s so, who’s to say I’m behind? If everyone thinks they’re behind, but no one even has a schedule, who’s feeding us this fear? And anyhow, I am on a train, and there’ve been some educational stops, and some decent scenery; maybe I just need to keep riding a while.

But if I’m reading this fear correctly, what are “we” doing to them? To their career choices? To their sense of freedom to develop a life that works for them?

SpongeBob and Patrick disappeared just before NASA scientists took this picture.