Babble Australia

God Knows We Need A Laugh / Bad Mothers Club

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:32:02 +1100

On the fantastic UK Bad Mothers Club website, there’s this brilliant bit called Tantrum of the Week.

Sick on the bedroom floor and lazy men and working from home are our faves – makes you realise that you’re not alone in getting pissed-off with your bloke/the world around you when you’re a struggling mum.

And we love the graph at the top of the page, too. Hey! Maybe we should start something similar on Babble…what do you reckon? Would you all vent your spleens/get it off your chests/tell us what was really getting up your goat if we gave you the forum to write about it? Tell us what you think in the comments boxes below!

What’s The Best Punishment For Kids?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:23:35 +1100

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What do you do when your kids misbehave? A poll by the self-proclaimed “World’s Strictest Parents” on Country Music Television’s new reality show suggests that 80% of parents – or at least 80% of parents who visit the “World’s Strictest Parents” website – favour punishing misbehavior in children by removing privileges.

The poll comes on the heels of new research indicating that a tough love approach to parenting serves children best. The “tough love” study found that kids benefited from hands-on parents who set and enforce limits. It did not say anything about particular discipline methods parents should use.This new poll, conducted by the TV show “World’s Strictest Parents” on their US website, comes to the not-at-all scientific conclusion that most parents prefer to punish teens by taking away privileges when they misbehave or are “lazy”. The other poll options were “yelling” and “giving more jobs to do”.

It’s probably a good sign that “spanking” or “hitting” did not even appear in the multiple choice list. An increasing body of evidence shows that corporal punishment not only hurts kids, it doesn’t work.

Some parents might opt for “none of the above” in managing their kids behaviour. Alfie Kohn, author of Unconditional Parenting, advocates skipping all punishment and reward in favour of what he calls “love reason”. This approach puts time outs and revoked privileges on the back burner in favour of communication and fair choices.

Most of us start out here, but when the happy, loving methods don’t work (say, around the time your kid turns two) we almost all resort to at least a little yelling.

Even the World’s Strictest Parents think that’s a bad idea: only 3% of them voted for it as the best way to manage kid’s behaviour.

Division Of Labour – What Does It Look Like In Your House?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:28:06 +1100

My husband and I have a very clear division of labour in our marriage: he calls Foxtel whenever there’s a problem and I don’t. That rule was created about three years ago, after an hour long phone call with a service rep that left me with a nearly permanent eye-twitch.

Other than that, we’ve got a pretty flexible system for dividing household jobs based on strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, and the number of hours in the day. Since I’m a stay-home parent, much of the household work falls to me, but the man knows his way around a vacuum cleaner and is not afraid to use it. Gadgets we split: computers fall to me, iPods to him. And the dishes are simply the responsibility of the last one up every night.

Michelle Slatalla speaks affectionately about the natural division of labour in a marriage in her New York Times column, Dear Banker, Don’t Call Me.

It’s a comfort, this divide-and-conquer approach, when everything is running smoothly. In addition to protecting each of us from what we fear most (me: things with cords, him: financial ruin), it also is a daily reminder of one of the major benefits of being married: someone’s always watching out for you.

And when things don’t go smoothly — in Slatella’s case, the bank starts harrassing her husband about their mortgage — it’s nice to be able to hand a confusing and overwhelming problem over to someone who has the know-how to handle it.

Of course, not every couple manages to divide the labour equally — which can lead to stress and resentment. Not every family has two parents – and loads of two-parent families have learnt that they most definitely can’t rely on each other, even though there are two of them! Whether you depend on a partner, other family members, or yourself, what does the division of labour look like in your family?

Photo: Jaako, Flickr

Michael Jackson Appears In Baby’s Ultrasound

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:40:27 +1100

Yesterday we learned that it’s normal for an ultrasound to look, well, a little weird. The baby’s still cooking, after all, and as one tech once told me: “Ultrasound is kind of like trying to tell what an elephant looks like by feeling its tail.”

What’s not normal, though, is looking at your baby’s ultrasound picture and seeing the King of Pop growing in your uterus.

British couple Dawn Kelley and William Hickman were looking at a 20-week scan of their seventh child when they saw something familiar. It wasn’t Granddad’s nose or Mum’s chin — it was Michael Jackson’s face! Take a look after the jump

Hickman says his six other children, ages 16 to to four years can all see Jacko, too, so it’s not just him seeing things, and that no one in the family is really a big fan of the deceased singer. Since the baby is a girl, there’s no chance she’ll be named after her likeness, unless they opt for the lovely name, Michaela.

But you know what else is weird? I can totally see it! It’s a bit like looking ast one of those Magic Eye pix, you have to squint and get different perspectives, but I really can see it! Can you?

Ultrasound photo: North News and Pictures via telegraph.co.uk

Photo of Michael Jackson courtesy of michaeljackson.com

Chemicals In Plastics Are “Gender Benders”

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:34:40 +1100

Does your son play with dolls? It could just be his charming personality… or it could be something more sinister in the water.

A team of UK scientists has found that chemicals commonly found in some plastics can make boys more like girls.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester, showed that two types of phthalates can affect boys’ play behaviour. Boys with high levels of exposure were less likely to choose traditionally “boyish” toys like cars, and less rough-and-tumble in their play.

Elizabeth Salter-Green, head of the British group CHEMTrust, called the chemicls “true gender benders”, and said parents should be concerned about the impact on their kids.

Phthalates have long been known to mimic human hormones, particularly oestrogen, but impacts on people exposed to them have been hard to pin down. A study last year by this same research group showed that male babies exposed to high levels of phthalates during gestation are more likely to be born with genital abnormalities than their less-exposed peers.

The two phthalates implicated in this study are DEHP and DBP. Both were outlawed in children’s toys and baby products sold in the US as of February 2009. Older children’s toys (think, last year’s Christmas gifts) may still contain these chemicals. These chemicals also continue to be common in household products that kids use, like plastic dishware.

How to spot phthalates in your products? They’re not always clearly labelled, to put it mildly. Phthalates are a softening agent, added to plastics to make them flexible. If a product or toy is flexible or stretchy, and is not made of silicone, it probably has some chemical softener in it. Products will often tout their “phthalate-free” status when they’re using a different process to soften their plastics.

Boys preferring dolls to cars is certainly not a bad thing. But a chemically-induced ‘gender shift’ seems a little creepy, to put it mildly.

Photo: Moonbattery

They Say: Fruit Juice Just As Bad As Soft Drinks

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:15:05 +1100

If you think you’re making a better choice for your kids by giving them fruit juice instead of soft drinks, you’re only partially right. Drinks such as orange juice, apple juice and grape juice may offer more vitamins, minerals and other nutrients than, say, Coke, but they also contain a lot of fructose, high levels of which have been linked to heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. In fact, a single glass of apple juice contains the fructose equivalent of six apples.

What’s more, juice contains more calories than soft drinks: a cup of orange juice has 112 calories, apple juice has 114 and grape has 152. The same-sized serving of Coke or Pepsi has only about 100 calories.

According to Dr. Robert Lustig, a paediatric endocrinologist, the small amount of positive health benefits gained from drinking juice are far outweighed by the negatives. But if fruit juices pose the same obesity and other health-related risks as fizzy drinks, why haven’t we seen campaigns to remove them from schools like we have with soft drinks? Probably because parents view fruit juices as nutritious and therefore are less likely to set limits on the amount their children drink.

But even if parents aren’t setting limits, the American Academy of Paediatrics is. In 2001, the APA’s nutrition committee revised its policy regarding fruit juice, recommending that kids aged one to six drink no more than one four- to six-ounce serve of juice a day. Older kids should have no more than two servings.

When it comes to fruit, experts say kids are better off skipping the juice and eating the fruit itself. Not only does this eliminate the high levels fructose, but eating a solid food rather than drinking a liquid gives the stomach a fuller feeling, which can help prevent over consumption. Also, they’ll be eating fruit the way it was meant to be eaten – pithy bits, fibrous stuff – everything.

Do you limit the amount of juice your kids drink?

Photo: oddharmonic/Flickr

Smearing The Placenta On Your Face

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:41:19 +1100

Move over placenta loaf. Bye bye placenta pill. The new way to remain ultra close with the sac your baby lived off in utero is by smearing it on your face!

Well, sort of.

The placenta facials that are catching on are made up mostly of regular old face creams. There’s just one added ingredient: somebody else’s afterbirth. Urgh!

We’ve got a lot of mega fans around here on the healing powers of the placenta – they came out in droves to support the consumption of the post-natal pill made up of placenta pureed and served in capsule form.

But this isn’t your own placenta going on your face. It’s someone else’s. Or how about this side of the coin: would you want to send your placenta off to a factory to be made into a facial cream for other people’s day at the spa?

For the latter, I can’t say that it would bother me entirely. It’s outlasted its usefulness for me, so have it, ladies and gents.

Image: SuperFantastic via flickr

UK Vogue Editor Spits The Dummy

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:42:36 +1100

The Editor of UK fashion ‘bible’ Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, has been shooting her mouth off again in, appropriately, the single-mum-baiting, working-mum-hating Daily Mail (one of the UK’s biggest-selling daily newspapers).

This time, she’s banging on about women who have babies who later want to return to work, with flexi-time, a four-day week, job shares etc etc making, basically, employing mums who want/need/have to work a pain in the ar*e for employers.

Which we here at Babble HQ think sounds ridiculous. Ms Shulman (an exceptionally well-off, verbose single mum) reckons the more ‘demands’ working mums place on employers, the less attractive employing her acvtually becomes. She basically thinks working mums are being greedy and should just stay at home with their kids and shut up.

Interesting. But what do YOU think? Living in a country that’s going to introduce paid maternity leave in 2011, many of the flexible working conditions that have become law for employers to consider for working mums in the UK seem beyond the dreams of avarice for us Aussie mums.

So go on – tell us what you think in the comments box below!

Mums Only Have Nine Recipes For Family Meals

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:00:51 +1100

According to the UK’s The Daily Mail, most mums only have nine recipes up their sleeves with which to create fab family dinners week in, week out.

To which we say: “NINE? How’d they get THAT many?!”

But what about you? Are you a veritable masterchef, creating and haute cuisine-ing every chance you get – or is your idea of a new and exciting family meal trying out the new Domino’s delivery that just opened up the road? Let us know what you think in the comments box below!

Separating Conjoined Twins Successful – For Now

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:02:14 +1100

Bangladeshi conjoined twins have been successfully separated by surgeons at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital.

Chief surgeon, Leo Donnan said: “To see them as separate human beings is an amazing moment.”

Sisters Krishna and Trishna were orphans, but have been looked after by guardians Atom Rahmon and Moira Kelly. It took 16 surgeons and 32 hours to separate the twins.

The twins were brought to Australia from a Bangladeshi orphanage in January 2008 when, it is reported, Krishna was close to death. Moira Kelly, whose Children First Foundation is responsible for bringing the kids over here, was said to be totally overcome with emotion.

Mr Donnan said her reaction was: “…a mixture of relief and all the emotion flooding out. When everyone had known these girls as one, with their individual personalities, to see them as separate human beings is a pretty amazing moment.”

Once the delicate task of separating the twins’ heads was completed, huge sighs of relief were heard around the country.

The twins will be sedated and on ventilators for several days until doctors are sure they will survive separately. Fiongers crossed for the little ‘uns, then.