I am so thrilled to announce that Naturepedic is very generously giving away one free Naturepadic mattress at each of the four SuperBaby events next week! Naturepedic is considered to be the gold standard in organic mattresses. My kids sleep on these mattresses themselves and I recommend them in SuperBaby:12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years.

They believe, as do I, that a natural and organic baby crib mattress is the first step toward a healthy crib environment for your baby. Other mattresses are commonly made with petroleum-based synthetics, polyurethane foam, vinyl (PVC), phthalates, chemical fire retardants, and an extensive list of added industrial chemicals that have been linked to health risks. Naturepdic avoids those toxic chemicals. For more info checkout their site at www.Naturepedic.com.

 Join me at the signings and get one raffle ticket for each book purchased. Raffles will be drawn at the end of the night and winners will be notified (don’t forget to write your phone number on the back of your tickets!).

 Monday, September 13th at 7 PM at The Pump Station Westlake 2879 Agoura Rd. Westlake Village, CA 91361

Tuesday, September 14^th at 6:30 PM for West LA Parents of Multiples Private home (members only)

 Wednesday, September 15th at 7 PM at The Little Seed 219 N. Larchmont Blvd. LA 90004

Thursday, September 16th at 7 PM at The Pump Station Santa Monica 2415 Wilshire Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90403

To RSVP to the events email SuperBaby@SterlingPublishing.com and indicate which signings you will attend or just stop by!

Monday, September 13th at 7 PM at The Pump Station Westlake 2879 Agoura Rd. Westlake Village, CA 91361

Wednesday, September 15th at 7 PM at The Little Seed 219 N. Larchmont Blvd. LA 90004

Thursday, September 16th at 7 PM at The Pump Station Santa Monica 2415 Wilshire Blvd. Santa Monica, CA 90403

You don’t have to be a celebrity to get an amazing swag bag! On September 13^th, 15^th and 16^th I will be giving away incredible gift bags at the Los Angeles book signing for my new book SuperBaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years. The first 50 people to buy two or more books at each of the signings will get a gift bag. These bags are filled with my favorite products, most of which I recommend in SuperBaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years. Each gift bag is valued at approximately $200 and has merch from the following companies:

Signing Time! ● Hanna Andersson ● Baby Legs ● Seventh Generation ● Uncle Goose ● Putumayo ● Parents Magazine ● EcoSystems ● Zoli Baby ● Born Free ● Naturepedic ● Burt’s Bees ● Cleanwell ● SuperGoop ● Retail Therapy ● Gdiapers ● Eat Cleaner ● Farm Fresh to You ● Earth Mama, Angel Baby ● Happy Baby Foods ● BabyGroup ● Homemade Harvey ● Herban Essentials ● Nature’s Paradise ● Baggu Bags ● EIO Cups ● Sensible Foods ● The Pump Station ● Healthy Child Healthy World ● The Environmental Working Group ● PETA ● and many more…

For the most up to date info on the events, the book, the swag bags and upcoming event raffles follow me on Twitter and Facebook. To preorder books and qualify for the swag bag go to Rare Bird and make an advance purchase. Keep in mind, you still must show up to the event to collect your bag.

To RSVP to the events email SuperBaby@SterlingPublishing.com and indicate which signings you will attending.

In my first book, The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy Confident Kids, I talked about how this new mentality of not keeping scores at kids’ games and giving awards to everyone who participates is actually harming our children. It prevents them from realistically assessing themselves, creates a sense of entitlement (“I showed up! Where’s my trophy?”) and prevents children from learning how to tolerate life’s disappointments.

I felt a little differently this weekend when my twin daughters, who are three years old, performed in their first ice skating competition. They have been skating for fun since they were two and recently when they were asked if they wanted to perform in the upcoming competition, gave an enthusiastic, “yes.” I suspect that knowing they would get to pick the music and the hope of getting an ice skating dress made it seem like a cool idea.

Watching each of my beautiful daughters perform in front of a crowd of people brought tears to my eyes. As a former elite level athlete (in rhythmic gymnastics), I know how much courage it takes to perform in front of a crowd and I couldn’t help but think that anyone who does it deserves a medal! That said, it was a tense moment for me when I realized that my daughters, who made up the entire age division, would  place first and second. Fortunately, they are not yet at an age where they know the difference between the red ribbon and the blue ribbon and there was no awards ceremony.

I do still believe that it is important that children have the experience of learning about themselves in a competitive environment. Both the experience of winning and, even more so, losing are incredibly valuable. That said, I think my girls can wait a couple more years before gaining an in depth knowledge about the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

Do your best to include him. Teach him how to do the baby related tasks so that he feels confident. If he doesn’t do it exactly the same way you do it, let it go unless he is doing something dangerous. Help him build on his growing strengths as a father.

We have all heard that television viewing can make kids more aggressive and even violent. But physical violence is not the only type of aggression that is effected by television viewing and violent shows are not the only shows parents need to be concerned about. In a study of media exposure and preschooler age children, researchers Drs. Jamie Ostrov and Douglas Gentile found that the more educational media children viewed, the more relationally aggressive they were. Relational aggression is when a relationship is used to inflict harm such as malicious secrets, lies, gossip, intentionally shunning, ignoring or ostracizing a peer. This type of aggression was found to be especially significant among girls. It is believed that young children, even preschoolers, have a difficult time understanding plots and, as a result, miss the overall message. Instead they learn from each of the behaviors demonstrated in the show, including relationally aggressive behavior. Even so-called “prosocial shows” designed for children show a high level of relational aggression. Most shows spend the majority of the program establishing conflict between characters and only a few minutes resolving it, leaving young children more likely to remember the mean behavior as opposed to the moral message. In an analysis of children’s programming by Dr. Cynthia Scheibe it was found that 66.6 percent of “prosocial shows” contained insults which is not dramatically better than the average children’s show which was found to have insults 96 percent of the time.

There is a movement in this country towards more conscious eating; eating that requires thought about how food choices effect the environment, how animals are treated and, of course, how foods affect our bodies. It has been estimated that 7.3 millions adults follow a vegetarian diet and of those 1 million are vegan (do not eat any animals or products that come from animal sources such as milk or eggs). Experts are reporting more and more children are choosing to go vegetarian  and more parents are opting to raise their kids without meat.

 Best sellers like Skinny Bitch , Eating Animals, and Food Rules have caused people to become more conscious about their food intake on a deeper level. According to a poll done by Vegetarian Times,  

• 46 percent of people report that they chose to become vegetarians to become healthier
• 15 percent made the switch for animal welfare
• 12 percent due to the influence of family or friends
• 5 percent because of ethics
• 9 percent did so for other reasons

Gone are the days when parents had to worry about their vegetarian kids having poor nutrition. Today’s markets, specialty stores (Whole Foods, Trader Joes, etc.) and online stores are filled with nutritious vegetarian options. It just takes a little more time, research and reading to make sure your child is getting a balanced diet, but it is worth it. There are many reasons for you to considering going vegetarian.

1) Avoiding disease and increasing lifespan.

I don’t know about you, but I want to dance at my grandchild’s wedding and I hope that my children will live well into the triple digits. In fact, research shows that vegetarians and vegans have far fewer incidents of heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, gallstones, kidney disease, obesity, and colon disease. Research at Loma Linda University has found that vegetarian men live, on average, about seven years longer than their meat eating counterparts. European studies have shown that vegans may live an additional 15 years over the animal-eating population. The China Study, which is considered to be the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted, quite simply found that people who ate the most animal-based foods had the most chronic diseases and those who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and had the fewest chronic diseases.

2) Inhumane treatment of animals

When I was ten years old I saw a documentary of the slaughterhouses and never ate meat again. Once you are aware of or, even more powerfully, witness the slaughter of animals, it is difficult to eat meat ever again. It is also difficult to explain to your child why she should not pull your dog’s tail but it is okay to put animals in some of the cruelest of imaginable conditions, as are done on factory farms which account for 99 percent of all animals eaten in this country, and then slaughter them mercilessly. According to one worker at IBP, the world’s largest meat packing company, “Workers can open the legs, the stomach, the neck, cut off feet while the cow is still breathing… I would estimate that one out of ten cows is still alive when it’s bled and skinned.” Others, John Robbins author of The Food Revolution, estimate that number to be closer to 90 percent.

We work very hard to disconnect from the truth of what we eat. We call cows “beef,” and  pigs “pork while we protect our children from the truth that we don’t want to face ourselves. When a friend’s insightful three year old son asked if the chicken he was eating was like the chicken he had seen on a farm, she was at a loss for words. As hard as it is, children deserve accurate and age appropriate information. Some may argue with me that telling a child that the chicken he is eating was once just like the one he saw walking on the farm is not age appropriate, but I disagree. Young children don’t need to know the details of the slaughter but they deserve to know where their food really comes from.

3) Environmental impact

Meat production is harmful to the planet and our children need us to keep it in good condition for their future. Research has shown that animal agriculture is the single largest source of methane, which is a greenhouse gas that is twenty-one times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

Factory farming also creates a huge amount of toxic sludge. According to the WorldWatch Institute, animals raised for food produce nearly 89,000 pounds of excrement per second which is 130 times the waste of the entire human population of the United States. Disposing of all this animal waste is problematic for the planet. While there are very strict laws about the disposal of human waste, equivalent laws do not exist for animal waste. Because of agricultural waste emptying from rivers and tributaries in to the Gulf of Mexico there is a “Dead Zone,” where there is no oxygen in the water and it cannot sustain any life. In 2008, this “Dead Zone” was reportedly 8,000 square miles.

Factory farming also uses incredible amounts of water, which is one of the earth’s most important resources. According to the Water Education Foundation it takes 2,464 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef. By comparison, it only takes 23 gallons to produce one pound of lettuce. Based on these numbers Robbins estimates you can save more water by not eating one pound of beef than if you skipped your daily shower for six months.

4) Avoiding toxins.

A recent study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives revealed that people who frequently eat poultry and beef have higher levels of PBDE’s (Polybrominated diphenylethers), a common flame retardant, in their blood. How did flame retardants get in your food? These chemicals are everywhere: in children’s pajamas, mattresses, computers, TVs, furniture, upholstery, rugs, draperies, home electronics, and car interiors. They leak into the environment through the air, are carried by dust and water and enter the food chain. These hormone disrupters have been linked to impaired memory, abnormalities of coordination, hyperactivity, and infertility. The study found that vegetarians had PBDE concentrations that were 25 percent lower than omnivores.

Because fish are known to be a great source of brain-boosting omega-3 acids, parents tend to be especially pleased when their children are willing to eat it. But it is important to note that mercury-contaminated fish are the main source of human exposure to this toxic heavy metal. While freshwater fish and large, long-living fish generally accumulate the highest levels, a government test of fish pulled from nearly 300 streams in the USA found every one of them was contaminated with some level of mercury. Mercury is a neurotoxin especially dangerous to neurological development in infants, children and fetuses. The study found that 27% of the fish had mercury levels high enough to exceed what the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers safe for those who eat fish twice a week,.

5) Contaminated food

If you think that thoroughly cooking your child’s burger is an assurance that he will not get a food borne illness, think again. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, food borne illnesses such as E. coli and salmonella still sicken an estimated 76 million Americans each year; 325,000 get hospitalized; and 5000 die. Many are children. Since her two year old son died from eating a tainted hamburger, Barbara Kowalcyk has devoted her life to advocate for safer food. But in many ways she is fighting an uphill battle. Since 1998 the USDA has been able to shut down a meat plant for the repeated presence of salmonella and E. coli microbes, but the federal agency has lost that power due to lawsuits from the meat and poultry industries.

While there have been cases of E.coli being found in fruits and vegetable contaminated by water containing cattle waste but it is most commonly found in ground beef. According to Public Citizen, a non-profit consumer organization, slaughter house workers kill and gut as many as 350 animals per hour and are under tremendous pressure to work faster, causing errors such as puncturing intestines, bladders and bowels during cutting which releases waste matter that ultimately gets ground up into burgers. As Eric Schlosser reports in his powerful documentary Food Inc., mass-produced ground beef hamburgers are composed of pieces of thousands of different cows. If one of those pieces of meat is contaminated with fecal matter, the whole lot is contaminated. According to Gail Eisnitz author of Slaughterhouse  it is not a question of “if” there is fecal matter in your family’s meat but “how much.”

Make That Change!

Whether you go ovo-lacto vegetarian (no animals), lacto vegetarian (no animals, eggs or dairy) or vegan, you stand a good chance of making a difference in the health of your family and the planet. The animals will want to thank you too. According to PETA by switching to a vegetarian diet you will save more than 100 animals each year.

Food has a lot of emotional meaning for most people and making changes, even when you want to, can be challenging. It can be helpful to get educated about vegetarianism and nutrition and also to share books with your child that reinforce the new family plan.

Recommended books for adults:

The Food Revolution: How Your Diet Can Help Save Your Life and Our World by John Robbins

The China Study: Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-Term Health by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas M. Campbell

Vegan Lunch Box: 130 Amazing, Animal-Free Lunches Kids and Grown-Ups Will Love by Jennifer McCann

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer

Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating by Erik Marcus

Recommended books for kids:

This is Why We Don’t Eat Animals: A Book About Vegans, Vegetarians, and All Living Things by Ruby Roth

Herb, The Vegetarian Dragon by Jules Bass and Debbie Harter

Each Living Thing by Joanne Ryder and Ashley Wolff

Hey Little Ant by Phillip Hoose, Hannah Hoose, and Debbie Tilley

‘Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving by Dav Pilkey

* A condensed version of this article appeared in Los Angeles Family Magazine March 2010

According to The National School Safety and Security Services the number of nationwide school related violent deaths have decreased from 33 in 1999-2000 to 13 in 2008-2009. But experts are reporting that when crimes are committed by kids they are increasingly violent.

It appears that we have the perfect storm of events. We have increasingly stressful home environments with a bad economy, children bombarded with violent images on television and in video games, a lack of face to face relationship with children increasingly relying on text messaging and email to communicate with friends and family, poor development of empathy skills among children combined with the impulsive underdeveloped teen brain. No wonder things are getting dangerous.

It is crucial that schools work to identify troubled students early and provide counseling. In the case of Wayne Treacy he has a father who has reportedly been arrested 43 times, a brother who committed suicide on his birthday, and the same day that he beat Josie Ratley unconscious, his girlfriend broke up with him. In retrospect it is clear that this kid was a time bomb waiting to go off.

Holding and rocking a baby is very instinctual and any parent knows it feels wonderful. But did you know that it is also advantageous to your child’s development? Here are a few reasons why:

1. It helps digestion. According the Ashley Montagu, author of the book Touching: The Human Significance of Skin, rocking assists the movement of the intestine like a pendulum and thus serves to improve digestion and absorption.

2. It calms the baby. Researchers have found that we naturally rock our babies at the same 60-70 cycles per minute pace that they experience in utero. Also, the synchrony that tends to result in the parent and infants heart rate recreates the familiar environment that was so soothing in utero.

3. It helps the inner ear. Part of the calming effect comes from the inner ear, which maintains equilibrium. Rocking helps infants to find their place in space and ultimately to keep their heads up in a neutral position.

4. It helps promote healthy weight gain. A study of twins, where one twin was rocked thirty minutes twice a day and the other was not rocked at all, found that the rocked infant gained weight faster than the non-rocked twin in every single instance.

5. Rocked infants are better able to track visual and auditory stimuli. Professor Mary Neal’s study of rocked infants found that, not only were rocked infants better able to follow visual and auditory stimuli but, they also gained more weight than non-rocked infants in a control group.

6. It helps circulation. According to Montagu, “Rocking, in both babies and adults, increases cardiac output and is helpful to circulation; it promotes respiration and discourages lung congestion; [and] it stimulates muscle tone….”

So after three years, three months, two weeks and five days of a screen-free existence (not even as background noise), my daughters Quincy and Mendez watched television for the first time. Why did we wait so long to introduce them to videos, movies and television programs you might wonder? Isn’t it educational? Aren’t there benefits? Well, for children under the age of three, not so much. Even The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that parents wait until at least two years of age.

In the past five years I have spent a lot of time reading research on the effects of television on young minds and have come to the conclusion that children are best served by waiting to watch television until they are at least three years old. I feel strongly about the value of waiting and have written extensively about the reasons I found compelling in my “Dr. Jenn” column in Los Angeles Family Magazine, my book The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy Confident Kids , and in my upcoming book SuperBaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years.

But I digress. Back to my own experience in opening this virtual Pandora’s box. Prior to introducing it, my husband and I decided to do a few things:

We made a screen time plan. We decided that television would not be a normal, daily event; that we would only watch it one time each week and that it would only be for a maximum of 30 minutes. We let our children know this plan in advance.

We chose commercial-free shows. By choosing a DVD or a show on the DVR, parents can avoid advertising which targets children, especially children of an age that don’t yet understand the difference between programming and commercials. These damaging, targeted commercials are incredibly effective at convincing them they need to make their parents buy their products and low nutrient foods in order to be happy.

We prescreened the shows. In addition to reading reviews and looking at the literature about children’s programming, we pre-screened the shows to make sure there wasn’t anything objectionable to us or which did not meet our parenting values or philosophy.

We made the experience an event. We decided that television viewing would be done as a family and that the children would never watch by themselves. We engaged our kids during the program by asking them about things in the program and followed up by doing activities related to the shows so that they would have a multidimensional experience.

So what did we watch? This has been the most frequent question I have been asked. The first two times we sat the kids down to watch TV, we watched Signing Time! which is one of my favorite children’s series. The show is filled with catchy music and sign language, the images are not overwhelming, the children are diverse in look and ethnicity and the messages are sweet. Our children have been listening to Signing Time! CDs and reading Signing Time! books since they were babies so this was an easy first step for us. Week one we watched Everyday Signs and week two we watched ABC Signs.

The next time we watched a video called Wonder Pets which is a terrific, operetta-like cartoon about animals who help save other animals. While we watched the show we occasionally stopped to try new signs or talk about what was happening, which took the experience of sitting and watching from being a completely passive time to an interactive and engaging activity and opportunity for bonding and learning with your kids. We also spent some time after watching Signing Time! listening to the CDs and practicing our signing.

So far this has been a very positive experience for both kids and parents. I can see how easy it would be to use the television as a babysitter or to turn it on when we are out of creative parenting ideas (or energy). However, we have made a commitment to do our best to provide interesting and educational moments so it is important to us to make our television experience both entertaining as well as a learning opportunity. I am especially excited for my kids to see things that they would not normally see in their own environment such as baby animals in the Serengeti, Olympic figure skaters, and foreign cultures and locales.

An article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times entitled Hours Sitting in Front of TV Found to Shorten Life revealed the results of a new study that found that each hour per day spent watching TV was linked with an 18% increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 9% increased risk of death from cancer. The study also revealed that people who watch more than four hours of television each day have an 80% greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease and a 46% higher risk of death overall when compared with those who watch fewer than two hours a day.

Another LA Times article that came out in October called Kids Watch More Than a Day of TV Each Week revealed the latest Nielson numbers which found that television usage by children has reached an eight year high with children ages 2 to 5 watching an average of more than 32 hours each week, on average. Some quick math reveals that that is an average of more than four and a half hours every day, putting those children in the 80% greater risk of death from cardiovascular disease category.

We know a sedentary lifestyle puts us, and our kids, at risk. In fact, experts warn that this may be the first generation of children who are outlived by their own parents. At an American Medical Association press briefing, Dr. William Dietz, Director of the Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity reported that six out of ten children today have a quantifiable risk factor for heart disease by the time they are 10 years old. “The more TV children view, the more likely they are to be overweight,” he says. “Reduction in TV viewing constitutes the single most effective way for children to lose weight.” A shocking study of the impact of television viewing which followed children from birth through adolescence reported that television viewing is the single greatest predictor of childhood obesity, even more than nutritional intake or physical activity.

After I wrote the articles TV’s Attack on Your Child’s Health for Los Angeles Family Magazine and Television and Your Child: What Every Parent Needs to Know, I started to seriously question how much television I wanted to expose my children to. But having grown up with a television in my bedroom, I couldn’t image not letting them watch. We live in a media saturated culture but, by the time my twin daughters were born in October of 2006, my husband and I made a choice not to let them watch television at all for the first two years. We made a plan to reevaluate every year. My children are now 3 years old and have never watched TV. I realize that this may make us a bit unusual as a family, but the benefits have been tremendous. Study after study show that children who do not watch television have better vocabularies, increased attention spans, more creativity and fewer health risks. My family has gotten to see many of those results first hand. Considering trying it in your home?

For more information about this issue check out :

The A to Z Guide to Raising Happy Confident Kids

SuperBaby: 12 Ways to Give Your Child a Head Start in the First 3 Years

The Elephant in the Living Room: Make Television Work For Your Kids

Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think and What We Can Do About It

Remotely Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives

Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age Five

If you are thinking about going cold-turkey, check out these great reads:

The Big Turnoff: Confessions of a TV-Addicted Mom Trying to Raise a TV-Free Kid

Living Outside the Box: TV-Free Families Share Their Secrets

Living Without the Screen: Causes and Consequences of Life Without Television