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.

During pregnancy women have nine months to adjust to the idea of a baby. We put the baby’s needs before our own from the start. We take our prenatals even if we don’t usually take vitamins. We suffer through morning sickness that sometimes lasts all day. We forsake our favorite foods and drinks—sushi, Cesar salad, certain cheeses, wine, and raw chocolate chip cookie dough. We feel life moving inside of us. But for men it is more abstract. They see changes in us and our bodies but it is harder for them to connect to the baby growing inside of us until they meet. Usually men focus on the financial concerns and express their anxiety there. Most men are a little shell shocked when baby arrives. They are used to feeling competent and being in control. Nobody is in control of baby. Frequently, men don’t fully connect with their child until some time between the first “social smile” and the first word.

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.

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