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Barbara F. Meltz writes the Globe's Child Caring column. She is author of "Put Yourself in Their Shoes, Understanding How Your Children See the World," and a frequent speaker to parent groups. Join her chat on the first and third Monday of the month at noon.
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| April 8, 2007 - April 14, 2007 »
April 5, 2007
Browsing the toy aisles of Target recently, I nearly gagged at the sight of the newest "doll" that Bratz is marketing: A super-sized, disembodied head called the Bratz Make-Up Head. She comes, you know, with make-up to apply to those giant pouty lips. Isn't this what every 6-year-old girl needs? Touring the aisles with me was Sally Lesser, owner of Henry's Bear Park, an independent toy store in Arlington and Brookline. You can bet this is not a toy you'll find on her shelves.
It's no wonder that when the American Psychological Association came out recently with a report on the hyper-sexualization of young girls through the media and marketing, Bratz dolls were specifically mentioned as part of the problem.
There are plenty of alternative dolls to offer girls. If I were a 7-year-old, I'd want an Only Hearts Club doll.
Taylor Angelique (second from right), in her funky draw-string pants and orange tee, sits on my desk. (Full disclosure: there's a Bratz doll on a shelf behind my desk. That would be on the reject shelf.) Lesser prefers the Groovy Girls, which is probably why they are what she carries.
Posted by Barbara Meltz at 10:08 AM
April 4, 2007
If you're planning your egg decoration for the weekend, here's a review of Easter egg decorating kits.
Posted by Barbara Meltz at 06:34 PM
April 4, 2007
The price certainly was right -- 25 cents -- which may account for why 4 million were sold. But the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced today that the Groovy Grabber bracelets by A&A GLobal Industries are being recalled because the paint on the metallic band beneath the decoration contains high levels of lead. If the decoration chipped off and someone mouthed the bracelet, it could be dangerous. The bracelets were sold in vending machines in malls and discount and grocery stores from 2005 until now.
Because not every recall makes headlines the way the tainted pet food did, it's worth checking out the US Consumer Product Safety Commission recall page now and then.
Also voluntarily recalled today by Target is the Little Tree Wood Actvitity Cart toy.
 The orange hubcap can detach and become a choking hazard.
Far fewer of them were sold, only 18,500, but what's worth noting is that this is the second time in two years that Target has recalled a toy made by Little Tree.
Posted by Barbara Meltz at 02:34 PM
April 4, 2007
You don't have to have a child who's one of the statistics to know that rejections from colleges are more plentiful -- and seemingly more inexplicable -- than ever this year. (See the story reprinted below, from yesterday's Wall Street Journal.) One of the more thoughtful discussions of what's going on was on Tom Ashbrook's "On Point" this morning on WBUR.
Of course, if you do have a child who is one of the statistics, intellectual discussions only go so far. At the risk of repeating myself, here's a column I posted last month on how to help your child deal with college rejections. And if your child got into the school of his or her choice, congratulations!
Colleges Reject Record Numbers
By Anjali Athavaley
3 April 2007
The Wall Street Journal
(Copyright (c) 2007, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
This year's college-admissions competition is turning out to be more brutal than ever -- and not just for students who applied to elite universities.
A number of top-tier state schools and smaller liberal arts colleges say they received more applications this year from well-qualified students -- and consequently are turning down a higher percentage of them.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill received 20,017 applications, up from 19,736 last year. The state school's acceptance rate fell to 33.3% from 34.1%. At Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, 4,624 students applied, up 8%, yet it accepted 1,348, down from 1,395 last year, to prevent overenrollment. Even schools that admit the vast majority of applicants are becoming more selective. Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, saw a record 15,836 applicants this year, up from 15,498 the year before; it accepted 73% of them, down from 78% last year.
"Students are being more intelligent about what their options are when getting into school, and they are looking in the next tier now," says Jennifer Delahunty Britz, Kenyon's dean of admissions and financial aid. "Schools that did not used to be on the radar of talented students are now on the radar."
Many Ivy League universities also drew record numbers of applicants and consequently admitted students at lower rates. The University of Pennsylvania saw applications rise 11% over the last year to a record 22,634, while its acceptance rate fell to 15% from about 17% last year. "The talent of students in the pool was so exceptional that we had difficulty making choices," says Lee Stetson, dean of admissions at the Philadelphia school.
Dartmouth College had a record 14,176 applications, up 2% from last year. It accepted 2,165, or 15% -- its lowest acceptance rate in history. Harvard University drew a record 22,955 applicants and accepted a record low 9%. At Stanford University, the number of applications rose 7% to 23,956. It accepted 10.3%, down from 10.9% last year.
Several factors are fueling the rise in applications. One is population trends: The number of students graduating from high school has risen each year since the 1995-96 school year, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. The U.S. Department of Education predicts that the trend will continue until at least 2013.
Another is the growth in international students. At UNC-Chapel Hill, for instance, recruiters went abroad for the first time this year, making trips to Shanghai and other Asian cities to promote the college. UNC had 736 foreign nationals apply this year, up from 590 last year. The university admitted 167 of them, up from about 125 a year ago.
A third is the growing use of the Common Application, a form that can be completed online and sent to a number of admissions offices far more easily than paper-based applications. More than 300 schools accept it.
The Common Application has "made it much easier for people to file 10,15, 20 applications," says Charles Deacon, dean of undergraduate admissions at Georgetown University. Georgetown doesn't take the Common Application to try to hold down its number of applicants, he says. Still, the Washington, D.C., university saw applications rise to 16,198 from 15,067 last year. It accepted 20% of them, down from 22% a year ago.
To be sure, not all of the most-selective colleges saw a rise in applicants. Yale University's applications fell to 19,323 from 21,101 last year. Although there has been speculation that Yale's low acceptance rate last year caused fewer students to apply this year, the dean of admissions has said the decline was due to a random fluctuation, says Yale spokesman Tom Conroy.
Generally, though, college officials agree it has become more difficult to get into selective schools. As a result, some high school counselors are encouraging students to be more realistic in deciding where to apply. "It's more competitive every year," says Shirley Bloomquist, a private counselor in Great Falls, Va. "I'm seeing more parents and students look at safety schools."
Ms. Bloomquist says she now emphasizes that students should prepare for their "likely" schools, those where they have a good shot, rather than their "reach" schools. She also encourages high schoolers to start looking at colleges during their sophomore year rather than spring of junior year, when most begin the process. That gives them more time to find additional schools that may not be their top choices but still would be desirable.
Even high school seniors with exceptional grades are being careful with their expectations. Last year, "I had some really smart friends who applied to some schools they didn't get into," says James Newman, 17, the salutatorian at Lamar High School in Houston. He has a 4.82 grade point average (boosted above 4.0 by International Baccalaureate courses) and scored a 2210 on his SAT out of 2400. He is active in his church youth group and has been an Eagle Scout, vice president of the National Spanish Honor Society and vice president of the school choir.
Mr. Newman applied to Princeton University, Stanford, Middlebury College, Duke University, Davidson College in North Carolina and the University of Texas at Austin. But he learned from his friends' experiences. "I tried not to have a definite first choice," he says. "I thought it's likely I'd get rejected because it's so competitive." He was turned down by Princeton, wait-listed at Stanford and accepted by his other choices. He says he is now leaning toward Duke -- he's not optimistic about getting into Stanford.
Indeed, college officials warn they may not take many students from their wait-lists this year. "We have not gone to the wait-list for two years, and we would like to," says Tom Parker, dean of admissions and financial aid at Amherst College. Wait-lists allow colleges to adjust their freshman class if there is a shortage of students with particular strengths and characteristics who plan to attend.
Amherst currently has 1,450 students on its wait-list. Mr. Parker expects fewer than half to stay on it. Of those who do, Amherst hopes to accept 25 students.
In the past few years, colleges -- even top-level state schools -- have seen a higher-than-expected yield, or percentage of students admitted who end up attending. That means there are fewer spaces for wait-listed students.
The greater competition has made the admissions process increasingly frustrating for students, including those who don't apply to elite schools. Corey King, a senior at Urbana High School in Ijamsville, Md., who wants to study music, heard from his first choice, Berklee College of Music in Boston, via email last week. "I actually injured my hand punching my door when I found out I didn't get in," he says.
Mr. King, who has a 3.2 grade point average, is a member of his high school's rock music appreciation club and French club. He also applied to McGill University in Canada, the University of Maryland and Towson University in Maryland. "Now I'm afraid I won't get into McGill or Maryland, and I'll get stuck going to Towson," which he considers "one step above community college."
If Mr. King is turned down by McGill, he says he will reapply to Berklee next year. He says he is feeling pessimistic after the Berklee rejection, but there is one consolation: "No matter what, everyone is like, 'I'm so done with high school,'" he says.
License this article from Dow Jones Reprint Service
Posted by Barbara Meltz at 01:22 PM
April 4, 2007
Janna Frelich is one of the few readers I've heard from who's been able to move the "Supply and Demand" story forward. She's got first-hand experience to show the numbers of long-term nursers are increasing. Here's part of her email:
"I'm co-Leader of the Boston La Leche League International group and just last week for the second time in the last 3 years at our Area Conference up in Chelmsford, I co-led a session on "Extended/Long-term Nursing". The first year of the Extended talk in 2005, we had 25 women attend; the 2nd year (2006), we weren't scheduled to give the talk, but several women emailed me to complain saying they needed the support and I held a mini-Extended session for 45 minutes in-between the morning speaker and the 1st session. The third year, I said to the organizers, you HAVE to have this session and we had 27 (mostly new) women sign up again. Obviously, there's a trend happening here! Some were professional moms (academics, business people, self-employed) and some were stay-at-homes; some worked full-time, others part-time."
Meanwhile, many of you have recommended sites for nursing moms. Here's one I particularly like: The Breastfeeding Cafe.
Posted by Barbara Meltz at 12:31 PM
April 3, 2007
The truth hurts. I was not the most magnetic speaker today at the Youth Violence Prevention Town Hall Meeting at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy. Hands down, that person was Rapper Lyrical, aka Pete Plourde, who somehow finds time to teach at Lasalle College and Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology and be a hip hop artist. He was profiled in this Globe article not long ago.
Despite our distinct differences in style, our messages were very similar. Here's what we both told the 100 or so high school students invited to attend by Norfolk County District Attorney William Keating and his office, sponsors of the event: Learning happens. (For an extended discussion on this aspect, keep reading at the end of this item. If you're in a hurry, skip to the tips at the end and read items #3, 4 and 8.)
Lyrical was talking about rap lyrics and pop culture, I focused on violent videos.
Here's the point: If a 7- or 11- or 17-year-old spends six or seven hours a week in focused concentration on violent action in a video game, will it make him a rampaging killer? No. Will it mean when someone accidentally bumps into him at the cafeteria, he's more likely to interpret it as a threat and respond aggressively? Yes.
The DA's office asked me to speak because of a column last October about a controverial violent video game, "Bully."
We all know that children are the future. Given all the violence that's happening right now on Boston's streets, DA Keating and his office deserve credit for their work to bring student leaders into the discussion. Given their insightful questions, these students certainly get it.
LEGISLATION WOULD TARGET VIOLENCE IN VIDEO GAMES
By Barbara F. Meltz, Globe Staff
Thursday,May 22, 2003
A grandfather, Congressman Joe Baca (D-Calif) didn't like what he saw when constituents complained about a video game called Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Among other things, a player gets points for hiring a prostitute, having sex with her, beating her to death, and taking back his money.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City went on to become the best-selling video game in America in 2002. Baca went on to draft legislation that would make it illegal for stores to sell or rent it or any other adult-content video games to a minor. Whether the bill gets anywhere could depend on whether parents like you and me call our representatives and urge them to co-sponsor HR669 so it can get out of committee.
Video games are voluntarily rated by the industry: M for mature (17 and older), T for teen (13 and older), and E for everyone. With few exceptions, notably some KMart and Walmart stores, retailers do not enforce the ratings. Even 6-year-olds can rent the likes of BMX XXX, which, at the upper levels, rewards players with live video clips from a strip club, or the newly released Postal 2, whose predecessor, Postal, is so violent it was banned in seven countries.
Probably the nicest thing anyone who cares about children can say about all M-rated, most T-rated, and even a big chunk of E-rated games is that they are offensive.
"When you realize what's on them, it's just not something you want your kids exposed to," says Daphne White, executive director of The Lion & Lamb Project (lionlamb.org), a grass-roots initiative to stop the marketing of violence to children. She appeared at a congressional briefing last week on behalf of HR669.
This isn't just about our individual children, though. Many researchers see it as a public health issue.
"I fear we are growing a society of alienated, aggressive, untrusting adults," says media researcher Joanne Cantor, professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin and author of "Mommy, I'm Scared; How TV and Movies Frighten Children and What We Can Do to Protect Them" (Harvest).
Two important caveats:
1. A steady diet of mature-content, violent, video games alone is unlikely to influence a child to commit violent, anti-social crimes. For that, researchers agree, there needs to be a host of other risk factors, including parents who are uninvolved or negligent, genetic influences, and negative social and environmental factors such as poverty and neighborhood violence.
2. Video game research is in its infancy; it hasn't existed long enough to produce longitudinal studies. Because children are active participants, researchers are convinced but can't yet prove that violent video games are worse than violent television. In virtual reality games, players don't just manipulate a character to commit violence, they become the character and look at the scene through his eyes. Sometimes all you see of the character is the extension of his arm with a gun in his hand.
There is, nonetheless, potential danger for even the typical child. Researcher Kimberly Thompson, director of the Kids' Risk Project at the Harvard School of Public Health, sums it up in two words: "Learning happens."
Think about how your second-grader prepares for a spelling test. She starts off with two or three words from a list of 12. You spell them, she repeats them, you spell them, she repeats them. Pretty soon, she gets them right. You heap on some praise, and move on to the next three words.
"When you practice anything, you get better at it. That's how the brain works," says Iowa State University psychologist Craig Anderson. He is the nation's pre-eminent researcher on the effect of exposure to violent video games.
Indeed, developmental psychologist Douglas Gentile, director of research at the National Institute on Media and the Family (mediaandthefamily.org), calls video games natural teachers.
"They get kids engaged, they're highly motivating, and they're repetitive," he says. With the right content, that combination can be a good thing; it's why he allows his 6-year-old daughter to play Reader Rabbit and Freddie Fish games. It's also why he worries so much about videos games that have even only cartoonish violence.
Even many E-rated games involve solving conflict through violence. Anderson says, "The player practices looking for enemies and making the decision to take violent action in response to them. The better you get at it, the more the brain gets wired to do it, and the faster you are at making the decision. That's what gets learned."
As Anderson and other researchers see it, the bottom line for the typical child is this: "If your 11-year-old spends six or seven hours a week in focused concentration on violent action in a video game, will it make him a rampaging killer? No. Will it mean that when someone accidentally bumps into him at the cafeteria, he's more likely to interpret it as a threat and respond aggressively? Yes."
In the immediate aftermath of playing even 15 minutes of a game with violent content, studies show the same results in 7-year-olds as in 17-year-olds: an increase in aggressive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. There's also a physiological response. Heart rate and blood pressure go up and adrenalin flows. Long-term, new research using brain MRI's also shows that the connections that are made in the brain from the repetition are stored in the long-term memory receptacle.
It is this that scares researcher Michael Rich. "We are giving children an opportunity to rehearse behavioral scripts," he says. "If you are presented with such and such a situation, this is a good way to respond." It's not just the violence that worries him, either. He has issues with a snow-boarding video game his son plays.
"You shoot off a course, slam into concrete, get up, and keep going," he says. "If you've been immersed in that environment long enough, something is bound to rub off. As a result of play, will my son take greater risks than he should when he snowboards? It's something I worry about." Rich is director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital.
These changes in attitude happen subtly, over time. Parents may chalk them up to a new stage of development or not notice them at all. Children certainly don't. Teens, especially, are quick to say they know the difference between reality and fantasy and aren't affected by these games.
Cantor says that knowledge doesn't protect a child. Neither does intelligence.
"We're talking about an emotional reaction that gets wired into the brain," she says. Like any other learning, you don't feel it happening.
The big question, of course, is how much is too much? No one knows. Anderson says, "There's no such thing as a safe exposure." He has two teenage sons and carefully monitors their screen intake. If mature content slips by him and he finds out, he revokes computer privileges.
Even if you set out to eliminate exposure to violent content when your children are young, it's hard to keep it going in today's world. Thompson says the best antidote is having ongoing conversations about content, and monitoring what children see on all screens. It's a big job.
Which may be one more reason why Grandpa Baca's bill makes good sense. E-mail your congressman today.
SIDEBAR:
1. Be an active participant in what children see on all screens, even at the youngest ages. Have conversations about content, make your values clear. The younger children are when you start, the easier it will be to continue to talk about it when the content becomes more offensive. (The difference between Teen and Mature content is that the violence is more intense, more cruel, andmore often than not, targets women and minorities.
2. Ask school-age and older chidlren to show you the games they have. Play with them. Ask questions: What makes this fun? What do you think about the content?
3. If your children already have games you find offensive, offer to buy them back. Then agree to some new games they can buy instead.
4. Don't accept the video game rating system at face value. A content analysis by the Harvard School of Public Health shows that 64 percent of E-rated games required players to inuure characters in order to continue playing. Also, don't judge a game by its wrapping. "Conker's Bad Fur Day", rated M, h as pictures of squirrels on the package, leading you to think it might have a nature theme. In fact, it's pornographic.
5. Children who are aggressive by nature or who have difficulty with impulse control are more adversely affected by aggressive, violent content on any screen.
6. The universal messages that come through about violence are that it's a solution to problems, weapons are everywhere, and everyone uses them. Messages about sex are that everyone does it all the time, and it's OK to be violent and abusive against women.
7. The amount of time spent playing at any one sitting counts. Children who are home alone after school are at the highest risk for the negative influences simply because no one is telling them to do something else.
8. If you watch violence on any screen with your child and talk about the content afterwards, it mitigates against it. If you don't talk about it, it enhances the negative messages.
Posted by Barbara Meltz at 02:19 PM
April 2, 2007
There may be more US adults living together without getting married, but think twice -- actually, make them three, four or more times -- if you're a divorced parent considering it. Professioanls who work with children have said repeatedly over the years that children of divorce suffer when parents have a revolving door of partners, even if a partner moves in and stays for an extended period. New studies continue to affirm that thinking. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University, in a paper published this month in Americal Sociological Review, conclude that the more transitions children go through in terms of people who come in and out of their lives, the more likely they are to act out.
Nobody's saying divorced parents can't date at all (phew!), just that you need to be thoughtful about how you go about it.
Posted by Barbara Meltz at 01:04 PM
April 2, 2007
If you're one of those mommies, nannies or grannies who can't wait for the reopening of the Children's Museum, you can start the countdown. Official re-opening is April 14. And in case you missed it in yesterday's Globe, here's a story that will tell you everything you need to know about it.
Posted by Barbara Meltz at 12:36 PM
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