I highly recommend the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein. In it, she explains why manufacturers of toy and baby gear make stuff in pink and blue. And the answer (no surprise) is that it causes us to buy more stuff.

For instance, my daughter got a gift of blocks in pink. The regular, multicolor set, has a picture of a boy on the package. This is cearly a ploy to get you to buy one set of blocks for boys and another for girls.

If you must buy things in pink, do it for things that are for use by one kid only, like pacifiers. Otherwise, do yourself a favor and buy things in neutral colors that work for boys AND girls. If the package is too girly, remove the toy from the box and repackage it in a neutral box.

Both kids found this to be fascinating, especially Matilda. She started pointing out places on her body that had hair and needed to be waxed. I explained to her that the wax was hot and she would not like it — which prompted her to ask me why I put hot wax on myself if it hurts. Oy.

A friend of mine told me about how her mother hauled her into a salon to be waxed when she was 12. When I expressed my horror at this she replied that its easy for me to be against it because I am relatively hairless. To me, hair removal is a vain and unnecessary act. To her, hair removal is an important part of grooming — like showering.

A similar debate is happening right now around the book Maggie Goes on A Diet. Its about a girl who is overweight and she goes on a diet and becomes fit and athletic. To me, the book is awful because girls have enough problems trying to keep up with the photoshopped models in magazines and advertisements. But others point out that we have a childhood obesity epidemic on our hands and that the book focuses on health and not appearance.

My final conclusion is to try to keep kids focused on how a body functions and not on how it looks — and that I should keep my waxing to myself.

PS. I am sure we can all agree that this book is a horrible piece of crap. My Beautiful Mommy – Written by a plastic surgeon to explain to kids about their mom’s cosmetic surgery.

As I write, he is wearing a ballerina skirt over his clothes and is playing with an Ariel and Barbie doll. Who can blame him? He lives in a house full of dolls, tulle and sparkle. His idolizes his sister and thus wants to do what she does.

Don’t get me wrong. Wearing dresses is not his preference. He just likes to do it sometimes, especially when he wants to dance. And he plays with  ”boy” toys just as much as he plays with “girl” toys. He loves trains, dinosoars, cars and trucks. He likes sports and is very active.

In short, he is what I wanted Matilda to be. He is open to both “boy” and “girl” toys and activities. At 20 months, Matilda knew that she was a girl, but Mateo seems to not know, or care. And I think its wonderful.

So why am I worried? I have this nagging feeling that its our job as parents to teach him that he is a boy and let him know what our society expects of him. Others clearly feel that way too. Well meaning people try to nicely explain to him that he needs to wear boy clothes, or that dolls are for girls. If someone said something like that to my daughter I would tear into them, but for my son, I keep quiet. I am conflicted.

The definition of what it means to be a girl or woman has changed dramatically since the 70s. But for boys and men, its basically the same. Will it ever be ok for boys to wear a dress out in public or to have a Barbie doll? Do we really need our children to be gender identified a such a young age? I would love to hear your thoughts.

HUCKABEE: You know Michael, one of the things that’s troubling is that people see a Natalie Portman or some other Hollywood starlet who boasts of, ‘Hey look, you know, we’re having children, we’re not married, but we’re having these children, and they’re doing just fine.’ But there aren’t really a lot of single moms out there who are making millions of dollars every year for being in a movie. And I think it gives a distorted image that yes, not everybody hires nannies, and caretakers, and nurses. Most single moms are very poor, uneducated, can’t get a job, and if it weren’t for government assistance, their kids would be starving to death and never have health care. And that’s the story that we’re not seeing, and it’s unfortunate that we glorify and glamorize the idea of out of children wedlock.

You know, right now, 75 percent of black kids in this country are born out of wedlock. 61 percent of Hispanic kids — across the board, 41 percent of all live births in America are out of wedlock births. And the cost of that is simply staggering.

The press made of big deal about Huckabee “slamming” Portman, but really he is demonizing women who, as he would say, “choose life”.

In his above quote, he implies that it would  be better if those children were never born in the first place. He is strongly anti-abortion, so I know that he isn’t saying that they should have been aborted. And he is also strongly opposed to funding of birth control and against sex education, so I know he doesn’t think that we need to increase usage of birth control in the USA.

So what solutions is he offering to this problem? Abstinence until marriage? Can such a delusional man really be running for president?

Calling out a woman who is going to marry the father of her child, and has millions to pay for the care of her child, is nothing more than slut shaming. Making women wear a scarlet A is only going to increase the rate of abortion, not reduce it.

Conservatives, you have lost the fight against sex. People are not going to go back to remaining chaste until marriage. If you want to reduce the abortion rate, work WITH us to prevent those pregnancies. Stop the war against Planned Parenthood and make birth control cheap and easy to get for both men and women. Educate our kids on how to avoid pregnancy.

And then if someone does get pregnant, create an environment where its easier for the children born to unwed mothers to survive and thrive. Huckabee hints that he would cut assistance to single mothers with children. The consequences of this strategy — increased poverty — will only lead again to more abortion. We need to hold “fiscal conservatives” feet to the fire and get them to acknowledge that we need to help people avoid unwanted pregnancy and even fund abortion to save money. And “social conservatives” must support government programs for women who have chosen to continue their unplanned pregnancies.

I would be very interested to know about any “pro-life” Republican members of congress (on the national level) who also support social programs to give food, shelter, health care and education to poor children. I am also interested in knowing about Republicans who support comprehensive sex-ed, funding of contraceptive programs and are pro-choice, again on the national level.

She asked me who the “girl” was, what she is doing. Matilda was just fascinated. She tried to pose like the robot woman and I nearly lost it. I just hustled her past the ad. But its not the first time that she has noticed ads with sexualized women in them that are geared towards men. She likes the way the women look and wants to be like them. Is it any wonder why? At a young age, she already knows the truth. If you are a woman, its important to be hot. Even if you are a robot.

I recently discovered that the actress Geena Davis has an institute on Gender and Media. They commissioned a study with some interesting findings. Emphasis below is mine.

This study, undertaken by Stacy Smith and Marc Choueiti at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, analyzed 122 family films (rated G, PG, and PG-13), including 50 top-grossing ones, between 2006 and 2009 and found that only 29.2 percent of characters were female. And one in four female characters was depicted in “sexy, tight, or alluring attire,” compared with one in 25 male characters. The female characters were also more likely than men to be beautiful, and one in five were “portrayed with some exposed skin between the mid-chest and upper thigh regions.” Because you wouldn’t want to take on the world without baring your midriff—girl power! (Another study found, troublingly, that women in G-rated films wear the same amount of skimpy clothing as women in R-rated films.) One in four women was shown with a waist so small that, the authors concluded, it left “little room for a womb or any other internal organs.”

Davis points out that boys are watching these films too.

“The more we see female characters who are hypersexual, one-dimensional eye candy, sidelined, or not even there,” Davis said, “the more it affects the way boys and girls think about girls.”

Read more here.

They are totally right. Movies like Madagascar, Toy Story, Finding Nemo are great. But there aren’t many female leads for the girls to identify with. Matilda recently became interested in the new Tinkerbell movies. They gave her a backstory and made her into a girl who likes to invent things and is handy with tools. She would be a great role model, except for the way she is dressed. Why is she wearing so little? Why is there so much cleavage in a movie for kids?

So far, the kids don’t watch a lot of movies. They are more about TV shows. I like:

• Dinosaur Train. They really could have gotten away with not having any girl dinosaurs in the family, but there are two!
• Team Umizoomi. Its a counting and numbers show. The girl is girly, so Matilda loves her. But she is not sexualized and is into math!
• Little Einsteins. Great DVDs with lots of classical music and girls that are just girly enough.
• Backyardigans. There are 2 girls and 3 boys. Adorable.
• Dora. I can’t stand watching this show. Its so boring. But Dora is one of the best role models for girls ever.

I recently watched Eloise the TV show with Matilda. Just horrible. What a brat.

What movies are good for girls?

So far I can only think of Princess and the Frog – The “princess” spends most of her time as a frog in the movie — thus we don’t have to deal with her in princess clothes. And she is tough, and industrious and wants to own her own restaurant! I love this movie.

The teacher says that she is not very confident. When it is circle time and she asks the kids questions such as what letter is this, what number, who lives at [address], etc.. Matilda never raises her hand. When the teacher calls on her, she often just looks down instead of answering. At home, I have noticed that she often will give a silly answer if she is not sure of the right answer.

I strongly feel that her shy nature is just part of the personality that she was born with.. but the Asian mom in me hates it. I wonder what we did wrong to have an un-confident kid?

In an effort to build her confidence we are thinking of reversing our previous plan to not enroll the kids in activities until they were in Kindergarten. I am hoping that exposing her to a lot of new activities and people will make her less shy and more confident.

Got thoughts on this topic? Please comment!

PS. Here are the positive things that the teacher said. Matilda is kind to her classmates and is a good friend. She shares, smiles and greets people. And she is a great artist.

If you don’t know the story, its about Horton the elephant who has great hearing and is able to detect a world of people living on a dust speck. He protects them at great personal expense from an authoritative mother Kangaroo with the refrain — “A person’s a person, no matter how small”.

In a sequel, he is tricked by a lazy momma to be bird to sit on hear egg for a whole year until it hatches. The bird shows up at the end to claim the egg just as it is about to hatch, but instead of a bird in the egg, its a baby elephant!

The stories are wonderful, like all of Dr. Seuss’s books. But after reading the books over and over again I wondered, are they anti-choice? Well according to Wikipedia, they are not. Theodore Geisel threatened to sue an anti-choice group to make them stop using his phrase on their stationary, and his widow stated that she “doesn’t like people to hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view”.

Though evidence points to Dr. Seuss being a left-leaning person, and his wife reportedly supports Planned Parenthood, anti-choicers have co-opted this story for their cause. Anti-abortion groups actually PROTESTED the LA opening of the Horton Hears a Who movie, where children were present.

My opinion is that the story is meant to honor children not fetuses. It makes Matilda feel great to hear the phrase “a person is a person no matter how small” because she is small and often feels powerless. And while Mazie the bird was lazy and didn’t want to care for her egg, it shows how HARD it is to care for an egg. It makes me feel appreciated as a mom to know that Dr. Seuss doesn’t take gestating lightly.

So back off anti-choicers. Horton is too great to be brought into the abortion debate! Leave him alone!

Now that she is older, I am really starting to be concerned. He favorite princess is Sleeping Beauty and she has started to complain daily that she does not have light skin and that she wants long yellow hair. She constantly plays at “being married” and asks me who is her prince.

Perhaps I should just chill out.   But as I put Matilda to bed at night and read her one of the below stories, I cant help but to worry about what the effects hearing these stories over and over again. There are repeating themes of competition between females, not having a mother or friends, stress on the importance of beauty not to mention the violence.

Here are my evaluations of the popular, Disney princess books. The film versions differ greatly from the books. Matilda is scared to watch movies, so we have not gotten to that point yet.

Sleeping Beauty

Every character in this story has a name except her mother!

This is a really scary story for kids. The drawing of the witch is scary and its scary how Aurora get lured up to the highest tower by the witch so she can meet her fate.

This is the most violent of the stories. Just try to explain this to your child –  “when the baby reaches her sixteenth birthday she will prick her finger on a spindle and die”. The book features a page where the prince stabs the dragon/evil fairy in the heart. There is blood.

Beauty and the Beast

There are so many stories in our culture of  beautiful, long suffering women who love men who are violent and have terrible tempers. In the grown up versions of these stories, the woman usually ends up dead so that the male character can feel badly about it.

Stories like Beauty and the Beast teach girls to believe that we can change the beast into a prince through the power of our love! Beauty and the Beast is probably the first story of this theme that girls are exposed to.

Belle like most girls in most stories, has no mother. She also appears to have no friends.

There are good things about Beauty and the Beast however. Belle is a brunette and the smartest girl in her town.  They sell dumbed down versions of the book that show Belle and Beast as just friends. They are like Goofus and Gallant. Belle is polite and clean and Beast is rude and dirty. I try to stick to these books rather than the actual story.

Snow White

The female competition between step-mother and daughter is intense in this one. Snow White’s step mother decided to kill her because she is more beautiful than the aging queen.

Thankfully, Disney books has edited the story. In the original, the evil stepmother instructs the hunter to take Snow White to the forest, cut out her heart and bring it back in a box. In the new books, he merely abandons her in the forest. A strange man comes and kisses her at the end and carries her off.

Matilda used to like this story a lot but I had to stop reading it to her because it gave me nightmares.

Cinderella

More female competition.  Cinderella has mean, ugly stepsisters and a step mother who hates her.

Her big achievement in the story is to have small feet and marry the prince.  Matilda asks me all the time when is she going to get married. And tells me the details of her wedding.

This is probably the one that I read to Matilda the most as there are no witches or violence. I also like the way that Disney worked the mice into the story.

The Little Mermaid

I actually have few problems with this one. Ariel does not wear a crown and in the stories she actually has a fully developed personality. She actually spends some time with Prince Eric before they marry and he seems to be a nice prince. Her underwater friends are great too.

Though Ariel has no mother, she has a complex relationship with her father and defies him.

Ariel’s story is best told in the movie. It doesn’t work well as a 15 page book.

I have tried a couple of things to deal with the princess problem. I attempted at one point to retell the stories my way. But she caught on pretty quickly that I was not telling the story “correctly”.

Disney has of course introduced some diversity to their line of princesses. There is Mulan, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Tiana. However, Matilda has no interest in these princesses.

So tell me. Is your daughter obsessed with princesses and does it concern you?

May 3, 2010
Teaching Physicians the Price of Care
By SUSAN OKIE

When Dr. Ryan Thompson, an internist, was a medical resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston a few years ago, he worried that he and his fellow trainees weren’t learning about the cost of medical treatments, the financing of health care and the impact of high medical bills on their patients.

So, with the help of faculty members at Harvard Medical School and another resident, Dr. Thompson organized an elective course for residents on the topic. In one session, “I made up a kind of ‘Price Is Right’ game,” he recalled. “I got the bill of a patient and actually went through it,” asking colleagues to guess the cost of commonly ordered tests, like CT scans. Their answers “were all over the map,” he said. “They had no idea.”

Doctors in training have traditionally been insulated from information about the cost of the tests and treatments they order for patients — in fact, for decades, the subject was virtually taboo when professors and trainees discussed treatment decisions during hospital rounds. During four years of medical school, students learn to order tests and treatments based on their knowledge of diseases and of scientific evidence.

Until recently, most schools included little information on financial factors, like how the insurance system works and how treatment costs affect patients’ behavior. As a result, most physicians enter practice with little sense of how to make the most cost-effective choices for patients, or how their own decisions affect the patient’s — and the nation’s — medical bills.

“Medical schools have done a really terrible job over the years in educating students about the system that they’re going to encounter,” said Dr. Michael Whitcomb, former senior vice president for medical education at the American Association of Medical Colleges, or A.A.M.C., and former editor of the journal Academic Medicine.

But escalating costs and the national debate over the health care overhaul are forcing medical schools and residency programs to grapple with teaching about the financial side of their profession. Accrediting organizations now require such teaching, and students and residents recognize that they need to understand finances as well as blood tests.

“It’s a very odd system where we make purchasing decisions on behalf of patients but we don’t know what anything costs,” said Dr. Neel Shah, a first-year resident in obstetrics-gynecology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “There’s no disincentive to ordering tests — all we have to do is click a button and we’ve ordered it.”

To be accredited, medical schools and hospital residency programs, in which doctors spend three to five years learning a specialty, are supposed to be teaching future doctors about health care costs and cost-effective practices. The A.A.M.C., which does the accreditation of medical schools, made this clear in a 1998 report. And since 2007, residency programs in the United States have been required to teach doctors to “incorporate considerations of cost awareness and risk-benefit analysis” in caring for patients, according to the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

A commentary in the April 8 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Molly Cooke, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and director of the school’s Academy of Medical Educators, said it was “a critical responsibility of medical schools and residency programs” to educate physicians about cost issues.

“Medical schools and residencies, in general, are taking this very seriously,” said Dr. John Prescott, a physician and the medical college association’s chief academic officer.

Nonetheless, the effort has not been universal. According to a recent A.A.M.C. survey, about 60 percent of 102 American and Canadian medical schools include some material on health care costs, although the time they devote to it varies widely.

Dr. Prescott said a separate survey of 155 large teaching hospitals that together sponsor more than two-thirds of accredited residency programs in the United States found that only 41 percent had made sure that all their residencies included material on health care costs.

Dr. Whitcomb, the former A.A.M.C. vice president, said one reason medical schools and residencies have been slow to tackle the subject is that most of their faculty members are academic doctors or researchers who know little about health care economics and don’t feel comfortable teaching it. “Trying to figure out how to do it and who’s going to do it is a real challenge,” he said.

Some medical schools have met the challenge by creating courses for first- or second-year students on health policy or professional responsibility that include information about treatment costs and insurance.

A second-year student at the Yale School of Medicine, Alexandra Ristow, said, “We discussed the fact that we have all this technology now that we can’t necessarily afford to provide to every single patient — and it’s not necessary, either.” She added that, in other classes, cost considerations are part of the discussion of how to treat hypothetical patients.

Professors ask: “What is this test going to tell you? Is it going to change the diagnosis, or change how you manage the patient’s care?” Ms. Ristow said. Concerns about treatment costs, she said, are “just very pervasive.”

But once students begin working on medical teams in hospitals, during their third year of medical school, they must focus on developing clinical skills and learning to care for patients — and, according to students at several schools, the financial aspects of care are seldom discussed.

“We all know that the cost of health care is high, but it’s sort of fuzzy how doctors play into this,” said Chitra Akileswaran, who has completed three years at Harvard Medical School and is enrolled in a joint degree program in medicine and business administration.

At the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City, students can get hands-on lessons about the impact of treatment costs on patients by volunteering Saturdays at the East Harlem Health Outreach Program, a student-run free clinic for uninsured residents of a low-income neighborhood nearby.

Medical students evaluate patients, choose which drugs are prescribed, arrange care for patients who need to see a surgeon or other specialist and collaborate with a social worker to help those who need social services or assistance paying for medicine. They also sit on the steering committee and are in charge of researching and updating the clinic’s formulary, a stock of inexpensive, cost-effective drugs that are purchased from the hospital pharmacy.

Dr. Yasmin S. Meah, an assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai who directs the program, noted that medical students initially campaigned to establish the clinic, similar to others at several New York medical schools and an estimated 110 nationwide, as a service to the community. Since opening in 2004, it has become an invaluable setting for teaching future doctors to practice cost-effectively. Students come to “understand what is necessary and what is not,” Dr. Meah said. “They’re using the cheapest drugs to get the biggest bang for the buck.”

During residency, trainees’ heavy workloads and the need to care efficiently for very sick people make it hard for them to consider the cost of tests and treatments. “You definitely try to think about it,” said Dr. Ian Warrington, a first-year resident in emergency medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “All of us are aware that a CT scan is significantly more expensive than a chest X-ray, and an M.R.I. is significantly more than a CT scan.”

Emergency-medicine residents memorize guidelines that help them determine when imaging studies are needed after certain kinds of injuries, and professors routinely ask trainees to defend their rationale for ordering certain tests. But sometimes, Dr. Warrington said, residents and the doctors supervising them will end up ordering an expensive test even when the probability of finding a fracture or a hemorrhage is low because they are worried about missing something serious, and about being sued if they do.

“You’re sort of working on not enough time and not always enough information, and you do the best you can,” he said. Cost “should be factored in, but realistically, with the environment that we practice in, you have to be very cautious how you do that.”

This article was produced in collaboration with Kaiser Health News — an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health policy research organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Circumcision as we understand it today originated when God commanded that Hebrews were the chosen people and that circumcision was to be performed on male babies as part of agreeing to such a covenant. Today, circumcision involves removing the vast majority of the prepuce (foreskin) of the penis, but back then, they removed only the tip of the foreskin, just “taking a little off the top,” so to speak. This procedure was called the “Mosaic” circumcision, and it didn’t require retracting the foreskin from the glans (head) of the penis. (It’s called “Mosaic” because Moses’ wife circumcised her husband in just such a way, ’cause he lived with the Egyptians and they didn’t do circumcision.)

But the Greeks, you see, who revered the male figure and wouldn’t have dreamed of “mutilating” the penis, did a lot of socializing and making public policy in bath houses, naked. Any Jewish man who wanted to assimilate into this scene needed to fit in somehow, and many circumcised men would attach weights to their now-shortened foreskins, to stretch them out to a passable length. The Rabbis got wind of this and it didn’t fly. They decreed that now Jewish baby boys needed to have all the foreskin removed, and the “Rabbinic” circumcision is how we circumcise boys to this day, no matter what their heritage.

We didn’t circumcise Mateo because its not a part of Pablo’s culture, and I am dead against it unless you are Jewish. Read Jocelyn’s full post here. It has the details on how they actually perform circumcision. You might want to avoid reading it if you are squeamish, or prefer to be in denial because your son has had one. However, if you are considering having it done to your son, PLEASE READ IT!