How is it possible that parents once survived three-month summer breaks without going absolutely insane?

The only answer I can come up with is they did it by neglecting their children.

I’m talking neglect by today’s standards, of course. In the 1980s, it was perfectly acceptable for 12-year-olds to run wild in the streets. As we headed into summer, I said I was none the worse for wear because of it. Two months later, I have to wonder if the same can be said of my parents.

Sometime between when I was a 12-year-old and when I became the parent of a 12-year-old, societal norms changed. For more than a decade, I never really considered that things like daycare, summer camp, sports, enrichment classes and other supervised activities were optional. If anything, I felt guilty that I didn’t have time to enroll my children in more programs.

If you had asked me a few months ago, I might have argued that kids need lots of structured activities to give them a leg-up in life. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that these “extras” might benefit parents even more than their children. After all, kids kept entertained and engaged by day tend to be exhausted by bedtime.

Last year, ferrying the kids from one place to another threw my schedule into chaos and no one was happier than me when summer arrived. I had no idea my bliss would be as short-lived as my son’s interest in using his vacation to beef up his math skills.

Despite putting up some tough resistance, my son did actually pick up some math concepts this summer. He took a course in graphic novels. He read more books in a few weeks than I’ve read all year and taught himself to use a video editing program that allows him to make movies of all his computer game accomplishments.

However, I’m the one who got the real education this summer. I learned that it’s easy enough to “program” your kid, but it takes a lot more to deprogram them than saying, “You have free time. Go have some fun!”

Looking at it in perspective, my son did a fine job of entertaining himself — most of the time. It’s the rest of the time that was a problem. A bored 12-year-old can be a scary thing and for the first time in his life, my son’s boredom wasn’t limited to an hour before bedtime or a few hours on the weekend. He had long stretches of excruciating boredom and he made sure that everyone felt his pain.

Now that school’s starting, we’re swinging back to the other extreme and I’m so filled with relief that it’s going to be hard for me to resist filling up my son’s “free time” with new activities. In between studying math, science and social studies, I’m going to make sure that kid has plenty of time to learn how to entertain himself.

If this summer taught me anything, it’s that the last thing I want is to go into next summer with a bored teenager on my hands.

Here’s me, sometime in the mid-1970s:

Here’s my daughter playing air hockey with me over the weekend:

*****

My daughter turned 5 yesterday, which meant two days of festivities — Chuck E. Cheese, “Space Chimps” (don’t see it!) and lots of cake and ice cream.

Rather than bore you with the details, behold the magic of Animoto:

We’ve seen the trailer for “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” so many times that my daughter bounces around yelling “ChaWOWwow” all the time.

We’ve even also seen the trailers for “Hotel for Dogs” and “Bolt” (about a TV star dog). I’d say the year is just going to the dogs, but that wouldn’t really explain why the “Madagascar 2” trailer shows before every movie I see these days.

So, where’s the hype over “Space Chimps,” which is opening this week to almost no fanfare?

I wouldn’t even know it existed, except for a sticker on the door at the movie theater and, of course, my job.

But my daughter knows. She can’t read, so she can’t figure out the date. She can’t tell time. But somehow she knows that “Space Chimps” opens this weekend.

Since my daughter’s birthday falls on Sunday and my parents already claimed Chuck E. Cheese, I get to take my daughter to “Space Chimps.”

I didn’t really HAVE to go look at the trailer to figure out that it was a movie about chimps in space, but I figured I might as well give it a look. Now I see why it hasn’t generated a lot of buzz.

If the movie has escaped your notice, too, now’s your chance to watch the trailer:

Men don’t want to be treated like equals.

They want to be to jump like dolpins!

At least that’s what Amy Sutherland teaches in her book “What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage.”

It’s true. I learned all about it on Fox News.

What if Sutherland said the secret to a good marriage is to stop nagging, ignore annoying behavior and reward positive behavior?

It probably wouldn’t be offensive, but it probably wouldn’t get her on TV.

Counseling wives to train their husbands like animals… now that’s an attention grabber.

It’s also “malicious marriage manipulation,” according to marriage counselor Victoria Baum, who was interviewed for the news report.

“The idea of positive reinforcement is wonderful, but to ignore the negative means that you’re holding in and you’re not getting your needs and your wants either communicated or met,” Baum said.

Sutherland, however, maintains this is a different way of communicating she noticed immediate results in her relationship.

Plus, she says anyone can use these training techniques to improve relationships with friends, family and coworkers.

“Even with myself I’ve used these ideas to sort of change behavior in myself that have been entrenched for a long time,” Sutherland said.

I’m no expert on relationships, but I’m not ready to buy into training people like animals.

Peace or…

Party!

When my friend called a couple weeks ago asking how he could childproof his home to protect it from my four-year-old, my first thought was, “She IS housebroken, you know.”

Bwahahahaha!!!

Housebroken is such a relative term, isn’t it?

I was pretty sure I could count on my daughter to not pee on the floor, but beyond that, I wasn’t sure what I could promise, knowing that there would be a few other kids her age there. At house parties, a gang of small children can be more terrifying than a gang of teenagers.

Case in point: The older kids hung out around the Wii. The younger kids became fast friends, and by fast, I mean racing around the house fast.

As a seasoned parent, I don’t mind chaos, but I also don’t mind leaving it behind to go spend some civilized time with my peers. In general, that means that I keep my family life and my social life separate, except on those occasions when the adults are doing something the kids would enjoy.

One thing I know kids don’t enjoy is sitting around quietly while their parents talk to other adults, so it was with great trepidation that I accepted an invitation to our friends’ home on behalf of myself and my two children.

Our hosts were prepared. They had plenty of kid-friendly food, video games and board games, a box of action figures and adults to dote over the little angels and whisk away breakables when the need arose.

One of the notable things about the smaller set, though, is that while older people tend to wind down over time, kids — especially those who have been allowed more than the usual allotment of sugary snacks — wind up.

It’s unsettling, literally. When you arrive, you hope that your children will find playmates. If they do, there’s an immense sense of relief as they entertain each other, giving parents a chance to socialize with their own kind. But while their parents are talking, the kids are talking, too. They’re inventing new games and one-upping each other.

Before you know it, there are naked G.I. Joes all over the floor, Monopoly money flying through the air and hysterical laughter drowning out all other conversation. The kids never seem to understand why this means the party is over. For them, it’s just getting underway.

As we drove home afterward, my 12-year-old — who was tasked with redressing the action figures and helping get his sister out the door — noted astutely that little kids party too hearty.

His sister wasn’t offended. She passed out in her car seat within five minutes of getting into the car.

This is when you know it’s time to go home.

As my son enlisted a toddler to help corral the two 4-year-olds my daughter’s new BFF tried to protect her, yelling, “She’s not a chair!”

He tried his hardest to hold her down…

… but he was no match for a girl so fast I couldn’t even catch her on film.

At this point, I realized that I should help the poor guy out by putting away the camera and picking up my daughter.

I didn’t realize I had done it before.

I found out today as an entire preschool class came running up as my daughter arrived, yelling, “Happy Birthday!” as I tried to signal to the teachers that today isn’t her birthday.

But it is, according to the emergency card I filled out last summer.

Both kids have birthdays that start with a J and end with a zero. In between there are a bunch of different letters and numbers, but one of my most frequent mix-ups is assigning my daughter a July 10 birthday.

It never got me in trouble before, but then again, she’s only 4, right?

I’d been wondering why my daughter kept asking if her birthday was this week. I figured it was because she’s not so clear on time yet. “This week” could mean this week, this month or this year.

I guess it could also mean this week. Now I understand why she asked me on Tuesday if her birthday was “the day after tomorrow.” She probably she really thought it was.

Luckily, we’d just had a conversation about her birthday driving up to her school and she knew it wasn’t today… I think.

I might find out she’s expecting presents when I pick her up from school.

It’s a pretty complex retort for children at an age when they’re considered average if they can string five words together into a sentence.

Chances are, they’re going to end up on the sticky side of the insult.

But isn’t that really they way it is? We tell our kids – tell ourselves even – that sticks and stones will break our bones but words will never hurt us, but words do hurt.

 
Still, don’t we all have embarrassing moments that will stick with us forever? Bullying on the playground. Frankness from a friend. Teasing from a sibling who knows how to get at your vulnerabilities.

Physical injuries fade, but sometimes the words just rattle around your head forever.

Bloomberg.com just reported on a study that showed that more than four out of every 10 college students surveyed had experienced emotional, physical or sexual abuse, either before they entered college or while they were co-eds.

Much of that abuse was “emotional.”

Where’s the line on emotional abuse?

You can show off a fractured arm or blackened eye, but how do you reveal a broken heart or bruised psyche? How can you tell whether you’ve just been knocked down a peg or if your ego has taken a beating that it will be hard to recover from?

Is having your feelings hurt the same as being abused?

It’s disturbing to think that more than 40 percent of college students feel they have been abused in any way. They might be going through life stronger as survivors, but they also might have plummeting self-esteem or pent-up rage they’ll end up unleashing on someone else.

It’s much easier to see things clearly when there’s physical contact involved. You can teach your kids what’s appropriate touching and what’s not. There are laws written that define those guidelines.

Emotional abuse is something different. We teach our kids that they have to have tough skins. They have to be able to tolerate some teasing. They have to learn not to take derogatory statements to heart. We want them to know that they’re better than anything anyone could say about them, but how do we really equip them to have that strong a sense of self?

Are we just settng them up to start absorbing all the pain instead of setting up boundaries to determine when hurt feelings  have become more than that? How do we teach someone to recognize that they’ve ended up in a relationship where they feel threatened, even though no hand has been raised in anger?

It’s troubling to think that so many children hit adulthood feeling that someone has not just hurt them, but abused them… and abused them in ways that parents might not have prepared them for.

Maybe we should stop teaching them to be rubber and help them figure out what to do when they end up being the glue.

When we got home, I downloaded the song from iTunes and played it over and over for her until she was too tired to move any longer.

On Friday, I looked up the video on YouTube:

My daughter was fascinated until I started trying to learn the moves. There’s an instructional video, just in case you can’t figure out what it means to go:

To the right, to the right, to the right, to the right
To the left, to the left, to the left, to the left
Now kick, now kick, now kick, now kick
Now walk it by yourself, now walk it by yourself
– “Cupid Shuffle” by (you’ll never guess) Cupid

 

It’s probably possible that my daughter could be less impressed with me, but it would be hard to imagine.

“Settle down!” she told me, pushing me back into the chair.

Rather than being the cool mom, I was the embarrassing mom. Unfortunately for my daughter, I’m the only mom she has. If she can’t handle now, imagine how she’s going to feel when she’s 12 like her brother.

And speaking of her brother…

On Saturday, I ducked into Steve and Barry’s, thinking I’d buy my son some t-shirts so he’d stop wearing his school uniform shirts.

He wasn’t nearly as amused with the “Chillin with my gnomies” t-shirt I bought for him as I as. How am I supposed to know that garden gnomes aren’t hip?

Good thing everything at that store is $9.98 or less.

I’ve never figured out why my son likes watching (and making) YouTube videos of people playing video games, but he does. When I saw this video from the Onion News Network, I laughed not only because it’s funny, but because my son is bummed it’s not real.

“It looks fun!,” he said.

I love the Onion.

(Apologies to The Onion for taking the video off YouTube, but I couldn’t embed it otherwise. You can get to the video on the Onion site using this link: ‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft)

I’m torn.

Is the best quote this:

“My avatar is the biggest World of Warcraft fan in the whole World of World of Warcraft world.”

Or is it this?

“When you’re staring at the computer screen, you actually believe you’re in a dimly lit basement staring at a computer screen.”

Why not click? It’s not like they’re asking for money.

When I was looking at yesterday’s message, though, I noticed a phrase that always gets me excited: “when you buy 1, you get 1 free.”

In this case, it’s a “Triple Wish Hoop Necklace”

I took a look, bought a pair for myself and my daughter and ended up buying some other things besides.

Each item I bought means one more book for one more kid.

Not a bad way to spend money, but even if you’re not in the mood to shop, it doesn’t cost anything to click the link.