Remember waaaayy back in 2007 when I blogged about a Po Bronson article on the importance of sleep for children? Well Po (and his co-author Ashley Merryman) have a new book coming out; NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. Yesterday Po was on NPR’s All Things Considered in the segment Parenting Tips: Praise Can Be Bad; Lying is Normal talking about the book.

In the book (and the NPR segment) Po said all this praise we’re giving our kids isn’t doing them any good. Telling Jimmy he’s doing a great job even though he just scored the game winning soccer point….for the opposing team by kicking the ball in the wrong goal…isn’t helping our kids grow up to be hard working adults. In fact it’s doing more harm then good.

Po says “only kids under the age of 7 take praise at face value.” As they get older they just expect praise for everything from outstanding achievements to mediocre work. And we wonder why teens today seem to have this inflated sense of entitlement (even greater than our own at that age).

We need to let kids develop their own judgment about what deserves praise and what doesn’t. We need to let them learn the difference between success and failure. And we need to let them learn from their own failures every now and then. With all this praise, failure has become an almost taboo topic. Failing is a part of life, but many of our kids feel like failing is not an option.

When it comes to education kids have become obsessed with the image of looking smart and therefore they don’t take as many academic risks. If they know they can ace the easy math, and look smart doing it, they don’t want to take a risk with algebra. They don’t want to challenge themselves and risk having to struggle through a more difficult course.

Keaton has always been a very smart kid. He greatly exceeds the average test scores in all standardized test (usually in the 90th to 100th percentile). He’s been reading at a college level since elementary school. He’s been in the advanced math classes since the 5th grade. But now in high school I see him shying away from some of the tougher courses because “they’re hard.” He struggled a little in his math class last year and (according to him) it was his teacher’s fault; the teacher just didn’t teach it very well. I asked, “Did you go in before school and ask for help?” “No.” He was just struggling because nothing was ever hard before. Now he had to actually work at something and it was very frustrating to him.

Po also touched on kids and lying. He said all kids lie. And it usually happens by the time they are just 4-year-olds. But Po also says lying is a sign of intelligence. It also shows some creativity. It takes a lot for a kid to remember both the truth and the alternative lie. So lying isn’t all bad.

But…

We need to condition it out of kids by the time they are around 7-years-old. Don’t let it become a pattern or a way for kids to deal with their problems. However, studies have shown that increasing threats of punishment make kids better liars who lie more often. Kids lie to make us happy. They don’t want to get in trouble. They don’t want to upset us. So they tell us what they think we want to hear. Instead we need to signal to them what really makes us happy. Po stops his kids the moment he thinks they may be lying and says, “You make me really happy if you tell me the truth.”

But it’s not just little kids that lie. Adolescents lie too. (Don’t I know that!) In the book Po and Ashley say out of 36 potential topics the average teen lies on 12 of them. Teens lie about things like what they spent their allowance on. What clothes they changed in to after they left the house. What movie they actually saw at the movie theater. It’s just easier if mom doesn’t know you snuck in to that R rated movie when she thought you were going to the PG-13 movie. Then there’s no argument. And she probably will never know anyway.

According to Po, 78% of parents think their teens tell them everything. (Really?!? 78%? Who are these parents?) But most teens disagree. (You think?) Even the teens who lie the least lie on about 5 of those 36 topics. Even the “good” kids lie sometimes.

Po says the best way to curb teen lying is to “set a few rules, consistently enforce them and negotiate occasionally.” Yes, sometimes you need to negotiate with your teen. Make them feel part of the decision-making process. In fact Po goes so far as to say that arguing is a sign of respect. A sign of respect? Well a teen has two options. Tell the truth even though it may lead to an argument or outright lie. The outright lie is probably the easiest option, but telling the truth can be the riskier option and usually the more mature option.

So head over to the NPR website and listen to the segment. Then let’s discuss. What do you think? Is too much praise bad? Is arguing a sign of respect?

It’s that time of year again. That holiday I dread every August. It’s back-to-school shopping time.

Every year I say I’ll be proactive and be the first mommy at the store to buy the glue sticks and Crayola markers as they pull them off the truck. And every year I’m battling other slacker moms on the day before the school’s Open House. Open House: the day when the kids have to take all their school supplies to school, put their crayons in one box, their dry erase markers in another, and the rest of the supplies in their new desk.

Tomorrow is Open House. Which meant today was school supply shopping day. I take procrastination to a whole new level.

I completely forgot about school supplies until late last night Lee said, “Don’t the kids start school next week? When are you going to buy their school supplies?”

My face turned up like I had just smelled something fowl and I said, “Shit! I totally forgot about school supplies. Is school supply shopping something I can hire somebody to do? I bet Angelina Jolie doesn’t do her own school supply shopping.”

But, even though I scoured Craigslist, I could find a single classified for anybody looking to be my school supply bitch.

So today Lee picked me at noon so we could head to Target to get in to a fist fight with other slacker parents over the last post-it notes or Fiskar scissors. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t too busy. Apparently some other parents were trying to show me up this year and did their shopping ahead of time. Brown nosers. Even more shockingly, Target had just about everything I needed. The only thing I couldn’t get was pink erasers and a TI-83 calculator.

Everything seemed to be going so well for us. And then it happened. Somewhere between grabbing the perfect ruler, finding the last of the index cards, and discovering they were out of the right graphing calculator, I realized…I was touching the shopping cart. With my bare hands.

I started to feel faint. I called out for Lee as I was losing consciousness. “LEE…I’m touching the cart. For the love of God. Take the cart. NOW!”

I scoured my purse in search of my hand sanitizer. I figured I had about 6.8 seconds before I lost control of my bodily functions. But MY SANITIZER WASN’T THERE. “Where’s my sanitizer?” I howled to Lee.

“I think I saw it on your desk. Right next to your laptop,” he said with a little bit of a smile that I totally did not appreciate. Couldn’t he see this was a life or death situation?

“We need to get to the hand sanitizer section STAT,” I yelled already scurrying in that direction.

The hand sanitizer was clear across the store. It was probably only about 100 feet away, but it felt like 100 miles. Half way there I broke in to a jog leaving Lee behind.

I found the soap aisle and searched for some sanitizer. My eyes honed right in on it. Shaking, I grabbed the first one I saw, squirted some in to my hand, and rubbed it in. Just then Lee turned the corner in to the aisle, laughing his ass off at me. Jerk.

So all is good. I was able to sanitize before the infection set in. And we got all of the school supplies we needed.

But I don’t know if I can do this all over again next year. Anybody want to sign up to be my school supply bitch for next year?

Yesterday we took the kids on our annual trip to a nearby waterpark. It’s something we’ve been doing for several years. And every year that evil waterpark reminds us just how old were getting.

As the kids get older they think they are mature enough to go off on their own. At 9. And 7. Yeah right. We spent most of the day chasing after them as one ran to the wave pool, another ran to the kiddie pool, and the other was chasing after the teenagers. No amount of screaming “STAY TOGETHER!” was working. I’m starting to serious think about putting them on leashes next year.

At one point Lee was chasing Caleb down the body slide. He was flying in to the shallow pool at the bottom of the slide and scraped his elbow on the bottom of the pool. He had a nice flap of skin hanging off his elbow and was dripping blood down his arm. Good times.

Shortly after that we raced down this big slide with four lanes. It was Lee, Skyler, Caleb and me. The kids could lay on their mats and push off with their feet. Lee and I were too big so we had to try to jump on the slide and get enough momentum to push us down. We both got stuck. Lee scraped up his other elbow trying to push off. I scraped up all ten toes. We were a mess.

Later we went on the big toilet bowl (a term the kids officially coined for it). You have four people in a innertube. You go flying down a water slide landing in a big cone where you go clear up one side until you feel like you’re about to fall out. Then you fly down and up the other side. You do this a few times before you finally get “flushed” out the bottom. Somehow Lee caught his knee on the slide and it ripped off a scab he had from softball. So that’s the waterslides 3. Lee 0.

The wave pool was no safer. Although they had four lifeguards on duty and only clear innertubes so the lifeguards could see the bottom of the pool, they were useless. Caleb was on a tube and floated all the way to the end of the wave pool where the waves were made. Lee was standing on the side of the pool watching him. With the rocking of the waves Caleb fell out of his tube. As soon as he was out of it another kid snagged the tube. Caleb was in water way too deep for him. Water that was difficult to swim in because of all the rocking of the waves. And as he came up out of the water after each wave he often got caught under somebody else’s innertube. Lee tapped the lifeguard and said, “You’ve got somebody in the water that needs you.” The lifeguard looked over at Caleb and then looked away. So Lee dove head first in to the water, in to the see of rocking people and innertubes, grabbed Caleb and dragged him to where he could reach. Lee thought somebody would yell at him for diving in because there were signs that clearly said “No diving.” I would have loved to of seen the teeny-bopper lifeguard brave enough to walk up to yell at Lee at the point. Instead a lifeguard came up to Lee and apologized. The lifeguard said he was going to talk to the other lifeguard Lee had tapped. She definitely should have done her job.

So in two weeks Caleb has tried to drown in a pool. TWICE. I’ve already scoured the recreation guide to get him in to swim lessons at the indoor pool over the winter.

But other than scraped up elbows, knees, and toes and an (another) almost drowning incident, we had a great time at the waterpark. This year we brought 16 of our closest friends. The park reserved a whole section for us to relax and gossip in. There were tons of kids for our kids to hang out with. And the adults got to chit chat.

But it was exhausting. I went to bed at 11:30 last night. And woke up at 11:30 am this morning. The waterpark gets more and more exhausting the older I get.

Today is my step-grandma’s birthday. She decided to celebrate by having surgery. I can think of at least a thousand things I’d like to do on my birthday. Surgery isn’t one of them. But to each their own.

Actually, a couple weeks ago her doctor found a spot of cancer on her lung. So today the surgeon removed the lower lobe of her lung. It’s the same surgery, for the same reason, and with the same doctor, that my grandpa had a couple years ago. He is doing well and I know my grandma will be fine too. The surgery went well and she looked good afterwards. So alls good.

I went to the hospital to keep my grandpa company in the waiting room. My dad already knew about my latest piercing. But I hadn’t told my grandpa. I knew it wouldn’t go over well with him.

When I got there I gave him a big hug and he looked right at me, but he didn’t say anything about it. After a while my dad said, “Dad did you see Christine’s new….what do I call it?”

“Jewelry,” I said.

“Yeah I saw it,” Grandpa grumbled with his eyeballs practically rolling out of his head.

A few minutes later Grandpa asked, “What is your major in?”

“Marketing.”

“How are you going to get a job with that thing in your eye?”

I laughed.

“What did you boss think?” he asked.

“In six years I’ve seen my boss exactly three times.”

“Would she hire you with that piercing?”

“Like I said, I’ve only met her three times and all three times were after she hired me. It’ll be fine.”

So clearly Grandpa thinks I’ve thrown my chances of getting a good job out the window with one little piercing. You know other than motocross racer, rockstar, or tattoo artist. It’s so sweet of him to worry about me.