On one side, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommended no screen time for children under two with little research to back it up.  On the other, we have seen an increase in television shows that value education and development.

She divides parents into two categories, the “whatevers” and the “worriers”. She sees that these often fall along lines of class and privilege. While most of her own inquiries are done in the middle and upper-middle class, she does visit the homes of poor and immigrant families. She sees that in poorer families may not have as much flexibility to keep their children away from media since they often share smaller spaces and may rely on the television for cultural connections.

Research on baby videos (such as Baby Einstein) that are marketed as products that will help your baby’s brain develop is just beginning, following strong market demand that led Disney and Sesame to create their own products.

So far, what they have learned it that small amounts of screen time will probably not help with brain development for children under two.  At that age, babies do not have the perception skills to interpret what they are seeing.  The author says that they will probably get more out of watching a parent fold laundry and much more out of being spoken to.  But it probably won’t hurt them, either and for some parents, it may be the only way to safely occupy their children to make dinner or take a shower.  What they may be negatively affected by is background television.  In this case, the active engagement of parents tends to decrease and also the children will simply hear less because of the background noise.  Because of these two factors, children’s learning opportunities are greatly reduced.

For older children, some television shows and video games fare better as tools to build learning, reasoning and social skills.  Most interesting findings, in my opinion are that the age appropriateness of a show has as much to do with structure as it does content. Those of us that have nostalgia for Sesame Street and the Muppet Show will be disappointed to hear that children 3-5 respond the most positively to a short show with a linear, structured and interactive plotline. Some of the shows mentioned are Dora the Explorer, Dragon Tales and Blues Clues.

Additionally, she warns parents to be wary of anything that contains violence.  There is some evidence that children who see violence are less cooperative.  Surprisingly, even violence that results in resolution is problematic.

“…they came to realize that the “be nice, be good” messages at the end of some children’s programs were not getting through to young viewers.  The resolution was drowned out by the usually more-engaging scenes of conflict that drove the plot.”

Ultimately choosing the media in the family is really tricky, particularly if there are young children of varying ages.  A show that may benefit and be age appropriate for a 6 year-old will most likely not be for a 2 or 3 year-old. And in the end, it is parent interaction that is always going to benefit a child the most.

Although I have done my best to summarize many of Guernsey’s findings, I highly recommend this book for those interested.  The book provides an inroad to understanding how kids learn by looking at the ways they do and do not respond to screen time.

She delves deeply into the studies and describes them in minute details to help the reader picture exactly what is happening, which I found fascinating.  Additionally, she does a good job of incorporating her own experience and is very practical about using television as a respite.  She supports the studies through follow-up interviews to experts in an attempt to address the questions as thoroughly as possible.  Since the research really is relatively new, there are times that she hits a dead end because the findings are just not there yet.

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I picked up this book on a whim when I saw it in the new arrivals section of my local used book store. I have been thinking a lot about my own diet and exercise recently (and always have historically) and the idea of exercise addiction was intriguing. Certainly the story of someone that has struggled with exercise bulimia – a compulsion to purge calories through excessive exercise – is a solid premise for a useful and engrossing story.

I got off to a bad start with the book when I saw that it wasn’t really a diary (or even a reconstructed diary), while it did use a diary format. Entries ranged from ½ page to a few pages and covered anywhere from a day to a months time. But, even some of the entries marked with a single day were written about a longer time period. Most of the entries are written in the past tense with a reflective tone. Mixed in were what appeared to be entries from Friedman’s actual diary that are printed in computer generated script. The inconsistent style and time jumps lends to a disjointed voice and disconnected this reader. With better editing, the book may have been a much better read.

Immediately after I finished, I picked up Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress, a memoir by Susan Jane Gilman to reread it. I immediately began cracking up, although the substance of Susan Jane Gilman’s life is really thin. She just knows how to write about it with such flourishes that make the absolute most of it. I often feel as if I am right there, relating what she experienced as a child or seeing her through her teacher’s or parent’s eyes. It is this that Friedman lacks. I often didn’t feel present and was instead bored, although not too bored to keep reading.

I impressed by the bravery which Friedman bears herself. She shows a lot of ugly parts of herself in order to tell her story, including rage, vanity and shame. It is these moments that kept me going through the logistical details of her life. Occasionally, you can relate to her feelings, but mostly you are plodding through the motions of her routines and her life changes over the course of 6 years.

Some of these routines are the substance of her eating disorder and some are only tangential. These routines seem to have a significance that Friedman implies, but doesn’t really drive home. For example, she speaks many times of eating ice cream and frozen yogurt. I never really figure out what she is trying to say. Is she guilty for eating unhealthily? Does she use it to rationalize exercise later? Does she feel free of her disorder enough to indulge? Also, she talks about her hair a number of times and it is not clear if she is actually this vain or if she is intentionally pointing out the sort of vanity that leads to eating disorders.

Ironically, I most liked Friedman’s voice in the Epilogue. Here, she discusses the nuts and bolts of her actual recovery, which she gives nods to throughout the book, but doesn’t previously deconstruct. She looks at her own emotional process and what she has learned about eating disorders and culture. I wish that her intelligent analysis had been able to permeate the rest of the book instead of countless details that we are never able to make sense of.

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Cloning is actually one of my favorite topics. My experience with it is in a futuristic, science-fiction way. Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is one of my favorite books and handles a similar topic. In the case of Never Let me Go, a whole class of clones are being raised to be a source of organs for their sponsors. The book beautifully handles the character’s (who are clones) coming of age and the evolution of their understanding of themselves. Movies that handle the topic nicely are The Island (the first half is a remarkable depiction of an imagined cloning industry, the second an entertaining action flick) and Blade Runner (I can’t believe that I haven’t seen the recommended Final Cut that has been out for several years).

So, that is all just background to say that I hoped this novel and movie would be worthy companions of these other works that I have enjoyed. The setting wasn’t so futuristic, it was actually grounded in reality in a way that made it potentially more interesting, but also may have made it harder to pull off. In the end, I had very mixed feelings about the book. Since I have not seen the movie, I will not touch on it except to say that from what I have read the plot and devices are substantially different from the novel.

I did like the book more than not. Honestly, it was partly because it was easy entertaining reading. Although it never really challenged me or even excited me much, I never considered putting the book down because it was interesting enough to keep me going and occasionally, the language struck me as incisive.

Picoult was successful in grasping the complicated emotional sides of the conflict from a place of respect and sensitivity. She created tangible and multi-dimensional characters that were articulate. Although the Mother, Sara is not always a very likable character, she is defensible and realistic.

“I know I jump at every sliver of possibility that might cure Kate, but it’s all I know how to do. And even if you don’t agree with me, even if Kate doesn’t agree with me, I want to be the one who says I told you so… I have a sister, so I know – that relationship , it’s all about fairness… But being a mother is completely different. You want your child to have more than you ever did. You want to build a fire underneath her and watch her soar. It’s bigger than words.” I touch my chest. “And it still all manages to fit very neatly inside here.”

Although the scope of morality and ethics within the issue was not as broad as I would have liked, Picoult does handle the humanitarian questions around autonomy and exploitation within the context of the story. As the father, Brian articulates, the only potentially correct answer is that there is no easy or right answer.

“Can you tell me what the right answer is here?” Brian asks, his voice raw. “Because I don’t know where to look for it. I know what’s right. I know what’s fair. But neither of those apply here. I can sit, and I can think about it, and I can tell you what should be and what ought to be. I can even tell you there’s got to be a better solution. But it’s been thirteen years, Mr. Alexander, and I still haven’t found it.”

Unfortunately, the book fell short on many counts. There were plot twists and subplots that didn’t add to book and, moreso served to distract from the overarching conflicts of the book. Similarly, the format of the book was based on switching points of view between 7 characters (see a recent review by martinesque questioning this technique), which was overboard, especially considering that some of the characters should have been relatively minor. Much of what was attempted by this could have been adequately conveyed through either a 3rd person perspective or through the astute observations of the character that I perceived to be the main character, Anna. These shortcomings limited the scope in which these ethical questions could be considered and led to the novel ultimately feeling too fluffy and contrived.

In conclusion, I liked most of what I read, but I often wished that it were in a different book. I see that I am disappointed that Picoult did not take the opportunity to tackle more of the controversies surrounding the issue of genetic engineering by bringing it out of the relatively safe and controlled family situation presented. While I appreciated the richness that she brought to some of her characters, all of her characters were compromised by the narrative strategies that she chose.

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You will find me under the handle gardensofresistance and I will continue posting all of my reviews to this blog, as well.  I will continue to keep a focus on adoption and child-development themed books, but I have also been loving getting back to some fiction reading and thinking critically and constructively about it.

I have also been actively using Goodreads lately.  It is a great spot to look at book ratings and reviews.  My favorite thing about it, though, are that I can see what my friends are reading and have read and how they like it.  I was turned onto one book that 10 of my friends had read and I had never even heard of it.  Users can also create “bookshelves” under different topics (parenting, bodywork, food, etc.) or categories (top 10 favorite books, best non-fiction, etc.)  Now, when I go to the used bookstore, I print my “to-read” list am armed with a list of authors and titles to look for.

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“After a lifetime spent in a virtual witness-protection program, I’ve been exposed. I get up knowing one thing about myself: I am the mistress’s daughter. My birth mother was young and unmarried, my father older and married, with a family of his own.  When I was born, in December of 1961, a lawyer called my adoptive parents and said, ‘Your package has arrived and it’s wrapped in pink ribbons.’”

It is her birth mother that is trying to reach her.  As she hears the day of her birth described, she plays it like a movie in her head and her birth mother, Ellen Ballman, she imagines to be like Audrey Hepburn.

“In my dreams, my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, the CEO, the DFO and the COO.  Movie-star beautiful, incredibly competent, she can take care of anyone and anything.  She has made a  fabulous life for herself as ruler of the world, except for one missing link-me.”

Homes demands several letters before she has direct contact with her, and immediately a picture very different than her fantasy begins to unfold.  She gets a sense of her Ellen’s history and family, health and also finds out the name of her birth father.  She sees Ellen’s poor grammar and hears her raspy voice. She describes their phone conversations,

“They are seductive, addictive, punishing…Each time I tell her something, she takes the information and holds it too close, reinventing it and delivering it back to me in a manner that leaves me wanting to tell her less, wanting her to know nothing.”

When I first began pursing adoption, a friend described a “primal loss” that all adopted people have.  With my own foster children, I had to watch them experience this in a very confusing context each time they left a visit from their birth parents. This story alone could carry my interest in this book, since I am always interested to hear the story of adopted adults. What I appreciate about this particular story is the way that this primal loss is experienced, articulated and held.

Of course, the reality for adopted children that are reuniting with their birth parents can vary widely. And now, the types of adoptions vary widely with open adoption being much more common, where it was previously almost unheard of.  A very typical story is one that contradicts the fairy tales and the birth parent just can never show up in the ways that anyone would hope.

From this story, I got the sense that Homes experienced this loss and came to realize that it was something that could never be filled for her because she could never have a fantasy mom.  On the other hand, it also seemed that the power of the loss and the fantasy were nearly eradicated by developing a relationship with her birth parents.

The plot thickens when the author meets her birth father, Norman. It is weird, but not as scary as her relationship with her mother, which would drown her if she let it.  He plans to meet her in hotels, talks badly about her birth mother (who he still seems to have a flame for)  and says oddly inappropriate things.  He asks for a DNA test although she looks just like him.

For a while, Homes continues to develop her relationships with them, but her birth parents only manage to overwhelm her in opposite fashions.  Ellen tries to smother her with immaturity, neediness and demands.  Meanwhile Norman proves that he is still the man that he was when he left Ellen, young and pregnant with false hopes and a shattered life.  He rejects Homes and blocks her out, only interested in keeping his life status quo.

After Homes’ initial interactions with her parents, she begins a quest to learn more about her genealogy by researching her birth and adoptive family histories.  One chapter lost me when it got into the details of this and in my opinion, should have been excluded from the book.  But, it is because of her research that some crucial and shocking elements of the story unfold.

While this does not go down as one of my favorite memoirs, I am glad that I read it and would recommend it.  It manages to be disastrous and brave, tragic and caustic.

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The cover image sums the premise of the book up pefectly.  The shoes of a smart-ass teenager (Jess), a washed up young rock musician (JJ), a middle-aged mom (Maureen) that caretakes her vegetable son and a pathetic tabloid-smeared TV star (Martin) squared off with each other, not necessarily for a fight (although they do happen), but because they have too many issues within themselves to make a circle.  They don’t really like each other, but they are joined together by the roof and the fact that they have nothing better to do.  They spend the evening together, initially as an easy out from jumping, and create a pact to look in on each other, which turns into a gang of lost souls. Jess says,

“And that’s me: I suffer from a failure of imagination. I could do what I wanted, every day of my life, and what I want to do apparently, is to get walloped out of my head and pick fights.  Telling me I can do anything I want is like pulling the plug out of the bath and then telling the water it can go anywhere it wants. Try it, and see what happens.” (p209)

Because they have nothing to lose, Jess is able to persuade the group to try just about anything, from reading books by suicidal authors to staging an intervention for themselves.  Many times, they get into various situations that are punctuated by humorous conflicts. In one particularly wacky scene, Jess has told the media that they saw an angel on the roof as a way to make some money for the story.  JJ reacts,

“We’d grit our teeth, say we’d seen an angel, take the money, and try and forget it ever happened.  But then the next day you’re sitting in front of a journalist, and you’re all agreeing with a straight face that this fucking angel looked like Matt Damon, and loyalty seemed like the dumbest of all the virtues.  It wasn’t like you could just go through the motions, either, when you’re supposed to have seen an angel. You can’t just say, “Yeah, blah, angel, whatever.”  Seeing an angel is clearly a big deal, so you’ve got to act like it’s a big deal, with excitement and openmouthed awe, and it’s hard to do openmouthed awe through gritted teeth.” (p166)

I was frustrated with the distance that I felt from the characters due to the writing style.  Although the characters were each wonderfully written (I even liked Maureen and JJ, but Martin and Jess seem to be intentionally unlikable) and their tragic circumstances were clear and sad, I never came close to a tear.  The chapters were written from their perspective and I could see what they were going through, but I was kept from really feeling what they were going through.  Maybe this is reflective of the numbness that the characters may have had to their own situations.  Maybe the book tried to take on too much to carry the emotional stories of each of these characters.

What A Long Way Down is very successful at is being black comedy, which I think by nature is a bit distant.  It is quirky, irreverent thoughtful and clever.  This book is touching without being moving and funny without being sidesplitting.  It maintains a low energy and unresolved quality and this is actually, what makes it masterful.  Conflict and disrespect comes and goes with compassion and support, while self-destructive patterns are interwoven with startling and brilliantly written self-reflections.

Each of the characters makes an honest effort to reevaluate their situation, if not evolve.  These were the parts that captured something that I had felt, or at least could relate to.  After the intervention, JJ is sitting in a bar with his pre-roof friends and realizes that life is worth living, but that it is not easy.

“Once you start pretending that everything’s shitty and you can’t wait to get out of it, which is the story I’d been telling myself for a while, then it gets more painful, not less.  Telling yourself life is shit is like an anesthetic, and when you stop taking the Advil, then you really can tell how much it hurts, and where, and it’s not like that kind of pain does anyone a whole lot of good.” (p299)

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The ramifications of her difficult behavior was starting to wear on us.  Jeff was doing all of T-7’s caretaking and I was doing most of T-4’s. We weren’t really able to take T-7 anywhere, because she would usually decide to stop minding us at some point and we would have to resort to carrying her to the car to leave.  We basically felt that we could not operate as a family, except for morning and evening routines and we could not successfully leave 1 parent with 2 kids.  Neither of us had been able to work at a level that is sustainable for our family.  The really scary part is that we saw no end in sight.

So, we were on the brink of a number of changes and we decided to let these new services settle in and see how things went.  T-4 had moved to a wonderful preschool that had wonderful effects on her behavior and development.  We had just switched our therapists to a program called A Home Within.   We also had a behaviorist coming into the home and we implemented a reward chart.  We were strategizing to get more results from our PCIT sessions.  All of our social workers had turned over and we hoped that the birth parent visits would change.  We planned to create a very stable environment for 3 months to see whether we could get our family to a sustainable place.

Our previous social workers advice to “Just wait, everything will get better,” was no longer believable. She had encouraged us to not consider a direction of medications and diagnosis. They just need love, stability and time.  She may have been right in the fact that in the first couple of months, it is too soon to tell.  But we knew that she could not say with certainty that things would get better.  We had heard too many nightmare stories of when they don’t. Not just in the media, but from people that we actually know.

We watched in awe as T-4’s behavioral  maturity began to surpass T-7’s. She was learning, growing and changing, while T-7 had been completely stagnant for 6 months. We noticed that T-7 could not walk by our side, hold hands, look in our eyes or play mutually satisfying games.  She squirmed away from receiving any touch, unless she was directing it.  She could not calm herself down or reflect on her own behaviors and relationships.  She did not learn, either. She was not able to recount anything that had happened to her during the day. It was as if experience and knowledge was something to have in a moment, but not to integrate. All of these things were confirming something that we had already suspected, that T-7 had attachment issues.

In the middle of April, we spoke with our friend B-, who has been our clearest advisor through this whole process.  She hooked us up with new resources that we needed to evaluate the situation. We had heard many different milestones referred to as far as when it started “getting better”.  Some people have said 5 months, some have said 1 year.  B-, who has two boys that had attachment issues said that for them it was three years. She suggested that we forget play therapy and go directly to an attachment therapist, forget any other appointment…this is the most important thing.  She said, definitely get meds for T-7 and start taking Excedrine PM myself.  She said that nobody really can understand what it is like to parent an attachment-challenged kid, that there were no rules other than not harming your child and that social workers and other parents would not understand.

So, we took this advice. We had a couple of appointments with a well-known attachment therapist, who felt that she was a clear case of Reactive Attachment Disorder (I am still not completely convinced of this, but I do think she has attachment “issues”). We began T-7’s psychiatric evaluation.  And night-time sleep aids were added to my managerie of bedtime companions (which has really helped).  I read my second Daniel Hughes book.  This all served to move us in a particular direction, that we had been looking for, quite frantically, for some time.  To some degree, these steps demoralized us. The book described to us how badly everything had been stacked against us from the beginning, following the advice of well-intentioned social workers and how misunderstood kids and parents with kids with RAD are.  The medication process was long and honestly, not that promising.  It made us realize how we have been hoping for quick fixes and that T-7 has years of healing still had ahead of her.

We began really reflecting on what we had wanted (and not wanted) and the ways that we had been misinformed about what we were getting into.   We started to think about what we were actually capable of.   We looked at our last 6 months and how hard we have worked and realized that we could not do that for another 6.  We remembered reading a book about RAD in the beginning of our process and clearly ruling that out in our own minds as something that we could handle.  So by the end of April were teetering on the edge of giving up.

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rating: 5 of 5 stars
Wow, this book was great. As I am preparing to be a parent, it is so nice to have some concrete examples of how to handle communication with kids to the methods that my parents used.



This book basis it’s ideas around encouraging autonomy in kids. It encourages kids to have their own feelings, mistakes and creativity by encouraging parents to back off when appropriate. In addition to having examples, there are a number of pages that are done workbook-style. I think these will really come in handy when I have a kid and am frustrated with my interactions with them and need to seek some guidance.



I think this book is a great resource for any parent or anyone that has relationships with kids.


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rating: 5 of 5 stars
I certainly haven’t tried every recipe in this book, but I have tried enough to know that it is spot on for what it is offering, which is a variety of grubbing, basic vegetarian recipes that provide some quantity. You won’t feed hundreds with these recipes, but you will feed 10.

I don’t use cookbooks very often. When I do, I am looking for inspiration for something new to try or I am looking for a basis on which to apply my own creative process upon. Even when I do use a cookbook, I rarely prepare the recipe exactly as directed.

There are a number of things that are especially cool about Punk Cookery.

First is Ian’s commentary. Although we are from different ends of the country, we are from the same scene. Like Ian, these recipes have history, which he shares with the user.

Second is that these recipes are good for a beginner or an experienced cook. I admit that a lot of times I pull out Betty Crocker when I am baking and modify these old school recipes to be vegan. But how do you do that for Lentil Loaf or Chocolate Tofu Pie? Well, you don’t…but this book has these recipes that can be followed to the T by a beginner or modified by an experienced cook.

Finally, there are simply some really cool and unusual recipes in here. My favorite section is the salads, which includes recipes for Sweet Pea Guacamole, Wild Rice & Artichoke, Greek Potatoes and more. I think there are probably recipes from about 8 different cultures. I also have Ian’s Ethiopian-Inspired Cooking, which I have been wanting to try.

ooh…I gotta go wisk my herbed polenta before it burns…


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I loved this book because of a few key points that I learned a lot from and will use in my parenting, regardless of whether I am using the 1-2-3 Magic method.

• It seperates “stop” and “start” behaviors, pointing out that how you get kids to do these different categories of behavior is going to be different.
• It seperates the “heat of the moment” of conflict from the lesson of the conflict.  It doesn’t try to get communication going when tempers are flared.
• It focuses on giving kids individual attention rather than trying to do things in larger groups when jealousies may be triggered and when sometimes noone gets their needs met.
• It gives clear examples of how to set up systems of punishment and reward that gets the whole family in a habit of understanding what is expected.

Basically, the premise is that behaviors can be stopped by simply getting the kids used to counting up to a time-out.  It gives them 2 chances within a short period of time to alter their behavior, then leads them to a punishment. The book also offers 7 suggestions for starting behaviors, including punishments and reward systems.

After reading the reviews, I have noted several problems with the book that others have mentioned.  First is that counting to get desired behavior can be obnoxious sometimes.  On the other hand, I see it as a last resort.  The whole point is that talking to your kids isn’t working, it can escalate into an argument and your kid still isn’t getting the desired behavior.  I actually think that this book is oriented towards people that have anger-management issues because at the beginning it speaks of avoiding hitting your kids.  Not that the book won’t work for anyone, it can.

Secondly, it has a bias about kids that not everyone will agree with.  It is premised on the fact that children are not rational small people, but selfish and greedy by nature.  They suggest that teaching kids from a young age is more similar to animal training than to working with other adults.  This leads to a pretty formulaic approach to time-out based punishment.  I agree with the criticisms that there is more to teaching kids than this.  Again, the whole point of the book is that during the heat of the battle of wills is probably not the right time to have that conversation for most families. The kid is upset, maybe the parent is, too.  Everyone needs a time-out before the lesson can really be considered.  Of course, this may not be true for all families, but many of the negatively portrayed scenarios described in this book sure remind me of my family.

So, I think that rather than dissing this book, it needs to be considered that it is actually not meant to be the only resource that parents will be using.  It is simply a discipline system that is a tool among other resources that one is using to teach.  Now I am reading How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and Listen so that Kids Will Talk, which I hope will be a good companion to it.

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