Parenting

Kids have an amazing ability to get their fingers into just about anything; hinges, jars, plugs, even other kids’ eyes. I’m sure we can all remember being yelled at for pulling apart the doll grandma gave us as a birthday present, or using dad’s hammer to “fix” the fridge, or that time you fed your babysitter a Tabasco-laced peanut butter sandwich just to see what would happen.

Kids are endlessly amused by their own imagination. Even the lowly stick was inducted into the Toy Hall of fame recently as testament to its unfaltering popularity among kids (and animals). 

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After numerous conversations with Beijing expats, I am still struggling to ascertain whether or not China has been hit by the Western world’s financial crisis. On one hand we have luxuries I would have to sell my right arm on the black market to afford back home. Ayis and massages immediately come to mind.

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In the U.S., I spent my summer vacations being pretty lazy; I spent June through August going to the pool, catching up with friends, sleeping late, or traveling with my family. For some reason, I imagined children and adolescents all over the world spending these months the exact same way, but I’ve now realized two things: not all countries have the same months for summer vacation and other kids out of school attended summer camp (6 million kids in America each year), try to make extra cash at a summer jobs or study at summer school (yikes).

While in the U.S., most schools allow a summer vacation of about three months, the summer holidays in England usually begin near the end of July and last until the first week of September for approximately 6 weeks of unadulterated bliss. 

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Getting It Done Without Tears & Strife 

Many countries celebrated Father’s Day a couple of weeks ago; male parenting was applauded and all the nice things fathers do were given recognition. For much of the year, however, children spend more time lamenting the embarrassing things that both their mothers and fathers do than embracing parental quirks. 

In a recent Washington Post article,  Donna Scaramastra Gorman, a tbjkids contributing writer, bemoans the type of father she had growing up – the extremely intelligent, overly helpful kind.  
When asked for the answer to a simple math equation, her engineer father would pull out his physics textbooks to explain the complex science behind her seemingly straightforward question.  

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Every summer my sister treks halfway around the world from her home in Oslo, Norway to Beijing to visit my mother and me. This annual tradition the last six years, has been an especially important one since our father passed away in early 2002. 

These past two times have been particularly special to my family because both my sister and I have both had kids within the past year and a half. My nephew Emil-Alexander was born in the early spring of 2007, and I was lucky enough to see him twice last year: the first time in Norway last July, and just a few weeks later when my sister came here to Beijing to visit.

My half-Norwegian-half-Chinese-American nephew is, as you’d imagine, adorable. Though he was born a few weeks premature, he has grown into a feisty, friendly and inquisitive little toddler – especially here in Beijing, where both and he and his mother have been staying with Lao Lao (姥姥, grandma) over the past two weeks. 

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A Chinese survey conducted earlier this year shows that 295,000 kids in Beijing are overweight, according to www.china.org.cn. This worries experts at the Capital Institute of Pediatrics who ran the survey because of the diseases that obesity causes, such as diabetes and high blood pressure. 

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In my household, my father never received an elaborate Father’s Day celebration. We’d usually hunt for the latest gadget to get him, and we often failed. My brothers and I usually ended up giving my father a stunning new tie, but he didn’t seem to really mind. We focused most of our attention on Mother’s Day – showering my mom with flowers and pitching in with household chores. However, ever since my siblings and I left the nest, our gifts to my father have gotten better over the years—but your family doesn’t have to be as uncreative as mine was! tbjkids has compiled a few activities, gift ideas, and imaginative ways to show dads you really care on Sunday, June 15. 

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I bet you won’t finish reading this...

I know this because, unfortunately, the addictive nature of web browsing is something that I am well accustomed to. I am ashamed to admit that I have, on countless occasions, stayed up all night browsing useless websites, all the while ignoring that little voice in my head that’s telling me to do something more productive.

It’s safe to say I’m not fighting this battle alone. I have watched helplessly as my own friends and family struggle to tear their eyes away from the enticing web pages of the Internet, and I am not surprised that the cause of the shrinking attention span of teenagers and children is being pinpointed upon this very phenomenon.

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It started with a small, hard lump in Marianne’s neck – my mother noticed it one day, when our baby was just two months old, and brought it to our attention. We felt it beneath the skin – a noticeable bulge along the ligament running up to her left ear – and a gnawing suspicion crept into our minds.

Over the next few weeks our baby continued to grow happily and healthily, but the hard lump remained there, though diminished in size.

At her monthly check-up the doctor advised that we simply wait and see (“Could be something she outgrows”), and if it was still a concern, to take her to see a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital (The Capital Institute of Pediatrics, 首都儿科研究所) by Ritan Park. 

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I have something to confess. As an only (and very spoiled) child for the first two and a half years of my life, I was less than ecstatic when my little brother was born. While my mother breast-fed the wrinkly creature I threw wooden blocks at his head and stomped around the backyard wailing, “Caitlin don’t get ‘nuff ‘tention.” And when my parents were busy cooing over his diapers, I pounded sticky couscous to the kitchen floor so that they were forced to deal with my mess. If only Dr. Harvey Karp had been around to give my parents a lesson in dealing with the primitive species that is an angry toddler.

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