Like Haney, I naively assumed that once I was married with kids, my dating days were over. Married for nearly 10 years, my husband and I are happily settled with our two young daughters. But, we still scan the playground looking for potential love matches.

No, we’re not swingers. We’re simply looking to “hook up” with a fun, easygoing family who has similar interests and parenting styles. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as it sounds. If I click with the wife, it’s almost inevitable that the husband will be a sports-obsessed drip. If we get along with the parents, you can bet their kids enjoy finger-painting — on our walls.

I still cringe when I recall the first—and only—time we got together with a new friend and her family at their place. Our husbands talked politics over dinner and voted the same colour, which was a plus. The kids played quietly in the other room—until my younger daughter ran in wailing, “He hit me!” Apparently, my friend’s son had started pummeling my daughter for sport. The parents were blasé, simply saying their son was “going through a rough stage.” We skipped out before dessert.

With no pick-up bars where we can meet like-minded parents, I often wish I could just post a personal ad: Over-educated, creative types seeking same for fun romps in the park and occasional trips. Two daughters (around 4½ and 8 ) a plus. Like to travel. Must be able to tolerate our dark sense of humour and enjoy lively discussions about politics and film. Not too much TV or junk food. Parental discipline a must.

When it works, “family dating” is ideal. You get to hang out with your friends while the kids entertain each other. In best-case scenarios, you go steady with a family and maybe even take the plunge and take a vacation together. But, as in romance, chemistry can be elusive. It’s tricky enough for two people to get along. Inject more personalities—not to mention complicated playdate schedules and squabbles over Barbie dolls and trucks—and things can get thorny.

Tamsen Fadal, co-author with her husband Matt Titus of Why Hasn’t He Called? and Why Hasn’t He Proposed?, said that families looking to date should proceed with caution. “Just like in dating, you’ve got to have things in common and want the same level of commitment. At least there’s no sex involved and so that doesn’t complicate things.”

Still, there are awkward moments of uncertainty and self-doubt.

Lauren, 31, and her husband had just moved to rural Georgia with their 2-year-old daughter last autumn and were anxious to make friends when they “picked up” another family at a wedding. They invited them over for an “afternoon of babies, beer and horse-shoes in the backyard” a couple of weeks later. But soon the initial spark had faded.

“They were good on paper: similar age and similar background with similar interests, but we did not click at all. The wife was really intense and the husband was really odd,” said Lauren. “The little conversation I had with the husband was stilted and he seemed perpetually stoned. I found myself doing the whole ‘we should do it again sometime’ thing even though I had no intentions of calling them.”

In Lauren’s case, the feelings were apparently mutual — the other family never asked for a second date either. But what happens when you think you hit it off with a family but they don’t reciprocate? When, maybe, they’re just not that into you?

After my friend’s son hit my daughter, I gave her the “sorry, but we’re busy” line the next time she invited us over. I know how she must have felt — when I asked a friend at school pick-up for the millionth time if her family was free to join us for brunch, she avoided eye contact and gave me the same lame excuse. She never followed up, leaving me to wonder if it was something I said or if my girls’ grubby table manners were to blame.

Share your family dating disaster/triumph. Not long after, I spotted her and her daughter out at brunch at a restaurant with another family. Like a jilted lover seeing an ex out on the town with someone new, I couldn’t help but wonder: “What toys do they have that we don’t?”

Different parenting styles can also put a crimp in burgeoning relationships.

Kathy, 43, a mum of two, said she and her husband happily “dated” one couple for years—until they visited their friends on holidays for a few days last summer. Their friends’ daughter “refused to play with my older son. She consciously excluded him, saying ‘we’re not going to play with Jamie today.’ I pointed it out gently to my friend, but she ignored it. I was their guest and it was awkward.”

Though nothing official was stated, in essence, they broke up.

“How do you tell your friend her daughter is being a complete shit?” asked Kathy. “We ended up cutting the visit a day short. Now we avoid them,” said Kathy, who still feels burned by the experience.

Maggie, 40, another mum to two, said she and her husband bonded over politics, wine and good food with a couple they met in the neighbourhood. Initially, the kids all got along. But soon enough, they couldn’t be in the same room without torturing each other.

“Our kids would throw huge fits when we would tell them we were getting together with this family,” said Maggie. “One time I saw my friend’s little girl put a whole handful of snow down my son’s shirt. He pushed her away and she fell into the snow screaming that he had pushed her.”

Rather than break-up, the couples talked things through and miraculously, their relationship survived, despite the fact that their kids are mortal enemies. “We finally acknowledged the truth and decided that if we wanted to continue being friends, we had to have plans without the kids,” explained Maggie. “Now, we just get babysitters when we want to get together.”

There is hope that a compatible family may be out there waiting for you.

“When we went over to their house for our ‘blind date,’ we totally hit it off,” said Lauren. “Since then we have gotten together several times and I’ve introduced them to my other friends.  Love match!  I feel like we should be on an RSVP commercial!”

Meanwhile, my husband and I recently got lucky on mid-winter break. We hooked up with a nice family at a ski resort. While we chatted breezily about books and music with the parents in the lodge, our kids played Monopoly and put on an impromptu dance show. After a few fun days of sledding together, we exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers with plans to meet up back home.

I’m hoping they’ll call, but I’m not waiting by the phone.

On a normal weekday, after homework is done, he is permitted about an hour to an hour and a half of gaming. It’s usually around the time I’m making dinner, so I’ve become accustomed to hearing ghastly sounds bursting out of the computer speakers while I chop garlic or debone a chicken thigh. My son gets bored quickly, so a typical gaming stint will include demonic cackles from his Level 65 “World of Warcraft” Death Knight alternating with the drawn out howls of pain from battling soldiers in “Team Fortress II” — along with the assorted explosions, machine gun fusillades, shrieks and screams that make up the rest of the soundtrack of modern gaming violence.

My son is not unusual. Boys under 17 years old account for 18 percent of the overall market for videogames (more than double the market share of girls the same age), according to industry group Entertainment Software Association. 12-13 year-olds are the peak of that demographic — hours spent gaming decline for older teens, presumably because the opposite sex has become more interesting. Boys are especially drawn to violent games — far more so than girls. Ratings systems designed to shield minors from “adult” games are a joke. Most big game retailers have a policy against selling games rated "M" (for Mature) to children under 17, but at least one parent of your child’s friend will blithely ignore recommendations. It’s much easier to play a violent video game than get into an R-rated movie. One study published in The Journal of Adolescent Health found that in a sample of over 1000 children, 68 percent of the boys reported that they played at least one mature-rated game regularly.

Among my son’s peer group, there is no more popular way to pass the time than to gather in front of a console and start piling up the blood and gore.

The Case for Critical Thinking

Why does Eli love first-person shooter games where it’s kill or be killed, where your outlook on the world is framed by whatever weapon you happen to be wielding? Because, he says, it’s “fun!” Because it’s “exciting!” Because … and he imitates a paranoid, hopped-up combat fighter’s body language — muscles tensed, eyes flitting from side-to-side, anticipating danger from every angle — and leaves the rest unsaid: The virtual world gets the adrenaline going.

Dating back to their earliest toddler days, when my children — I have a 15-year-old daughter — first started reaching for the remote control and the mouse, I’ve been concerned about how good parenting and modern entertainment intersect. I’ve generally taken a pretty liberal approach — likely due to a combination of factors. My parents never banned anything — my father was a television critic and I have always been a voracious consumer of media of all kinds. Censoring my children’s media consumption felt hypocritical from day one. With the one major exception of sexually explicit material, and within the constraints of regularly enforced screen time limits (TV, games, Facebook all fitting under that one category), I’ve mostly let my children watch and play what they want, although I do make sure to keep an eye on whatever it is they are checking out. Even if I believed it was possible to successfully cordon off the forbidden (which I don’t), my basic position has been that I’d rather raise my kids to critically engage the world than attempt to shelter them from it.

In general, I’m not unhappy with the results. My daughter may have ended up watching more episodes of America’s Next Top Model than I am comfortable with, but she is also a third generation feminist and is able to balance that contradiction. And my son may leave a trail of virtual corpses (human, alien, and magical) behind him everywhere he games, he may devote an inordinate amount of brain power to the question of what type of battle-axe his latest barbarian giant should be packing, and he can talk your ears off discussing the varying merits of the newest handheld gaming devices (“I know my lore,” he once told me, when I expressed surprise at how far back his encyclopedic knowledge of the gaming industry went), but he is in general a sociable, friendly, enthusiastic kid, fully engaged with school. He likes to roughhouse with his friends but he’s never been in a fight. He’s just your typical sweetheart who has slaughtered millions.

When Videogames Become Too Realistic

So I think I’m doing something right. My sample of one declares that obsessive gaming, properly regulated, doesn’t lead immediately to social dysfunction — at least not yet. But even so, I feel a sense of disquiet at just how much his entire generation is drawn to the killing fields. Too much of their interaction with the world is mediated, too much of it is high-intensity adrenaline-revving virtual combat, too much of the real world seems boring and uneventful, compared to the gaming life. What happens when my boy leaves the nest? Will he disappear into a videogame vortex? I wonder where this is all headed, for the simple reason that games are just getting too compelling.

Computer gaming has been a part of growing up for at least 35 years now, dating back to Pong and PacMan. But we have never seen anything like the complexity, aesthetic power, narrative depth, realism, immersiveness and addictive potential of today’s games. In the game “Spore,” you can evolve your own life form from scratch into a space-faring civilisation (and choose whether to be warlike or peaceful.) One of 2009’s hits, “Assassin’s Creed 2,” places you on the canals of Renaissance era Venice — in a world as lush as any painted by Titian or Tintoretto. “World of Warcraft” draws you into a fantasy landscape so rich and deep and interactive that reading J. R. R. Tolkien feels like a pale simulacrum, a bowl of bran that can’t compete with a 12-course banquet.

And then there’s the blockbuster smash of 2009, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2,” which grossed $US550 million in revenue just five days after its November release, putting it on a par with the biggest Hollywood productions. “Modern Warfare 2” delivers a hyper-realistic commando-fighting experience merging amazing movie production values with a narrative of terrorism, global warfare and constant peril ripped directly from the latest headlines in Afghanistan, Moscow and Washington. Watching kids play it is not unlike imagining yourself inhabiting the TV series 24; That much realism gives me pause.

The real world has a harder and harder time competing with these marvels of simulation. If I didn’t impose screen-time limits, my son would play these games until he keeled over.

Handling the Skeptics

My ex-sister-in-law, a mother of three young boys, views violent games as an evil distillation of 10,000 years of male war-mongering and brutality; she is convinced, like many pundits and psychologists, that such games desensitise kids to violence. Almost every parent I know worries about this to some extent, even if they don’t go quite so far as to denounce all of human civilisation. At the other end of the spectrum stand eloquent gaming advocates like Steven Johnson, who provocatively argues that hours spent in virtual distraction can positively prepare kids to excel in an ADHD, relentlessly multitasking world. I can’t subscribe to either view. The data, to say the least, are inconclusive. Untangling cause and effect from socioeconomic status, family dynamics and genetic predisposition is no easy task.

But it seems undeniable that there are consequences to so many hours spent in immersive, interactive environments. So in the absence of knowing anything for sure, what are we supposed to do?

Teaching Real World Lessons Through Gaming

When my kids first started watching television, rather than try to avoid commercials, I asked them to ask themselves one question whenever an ad came on: What do they want me to buy? It became a game even kindergarteners could play: Deconstruct the media! And I tried, when possible, to experience the world with them, rather than from afar. A critical stance, I hoped, would arm them against media propaganda better than placing them in an isolation ward. But what this requires is active engagement on the part of the parent, too. You can’t just let the TV be a babysitter. So I didn’t stop my preteen daughter from watching America’s Next Top Model, but you can be sure there were plenty of conversations about how pop culture treats women’s bodies.

I’ve tried to continue the same policy of engagement with gaming. When my son spends an hour talking about an escapade in “World of Warcraft” or "Team Fortress II," I try to draw connections between virtual war and real war, without being heavy-handed. I check in on him while he’s playing — his computer is in the dining room between our kitchen and family room, so he is always part of the house dynamic, rather than squirreled away behind closed doors. If he is playing a game I’ve never seen before — because you can find almost anything on the Web — I want to know what he likes about it. And I’m not shy to tell him when I find something objectionable. Once I was alarmed to discover him playing a Web-accessible game that featured street-fighting hobos beating up on each other in a darkened alley. He thought it was funny; I thought it was disgusting. But rather than ban it, I wanted to make sure he understood why I thought it was mean. We launched into a mini discussion of why poverty and homelessness weren’t all giggles.

How much of it stuck? I have no idea. I never saw him play the game again. But I’m betting that this strategy will have a more effective long-term impact than a command-and-control approach.

One recent attempt to exert some level of editorial responsibility over gaming turned out to be an almost comic failure. I decided not to buy him “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2” for his birthday last November because I was suspicious of its rah-rah nationalistic politics and disturbed by just how closely it looked like footage from Iraq or Chechnya. I didn’t want to be personally responsible for bringing it into the house. A few months later, half of his best friends had the game and his opportunities to play it seem unlimited.

Having the Videogame Conversation

Eli doesn’t particularly like it when I express my distaste for some aspect of his gaming life. I’m sure he isn’t looking forward to having his Modern Warfare gaming accompanied by my kibitzing on the ineffectiveness of torture or how Government policy in the Mideast helps to breed terrorism. But he does appreciate it when I take his world seriously. He enjoys the give and take. And he’s getting a big dose of my values, without my bashing them into his brain with a sledgehammer.

A few months ago, my ears perked up when I heard the voices of young men spewing out a wide range of homophobic, racist and misogynistic comments from the computer speakers. Eli was playing a game called "Team Fortress 2," another first-person shooter, but one in which you could hear the live comments of other human players currently logged in and playing on the same server.

My first impulse was to tell him he shouldn’t be playing a game frequented by such cretins. But I knew a teenager who lives at his mother’s house played the game regularly, and I could not control his exposure over there. One way or another, he was going to hear this crap. So I kept to my usual path. I asked him if he understood why I found their comments so objectionable. I made fun of the intelligence of his fellow gamers, suggesting, uncharitably, that they hadn’t been brought up very well. He got a sour look on his face, but eventually he admitted he didn’t particularly like hearing a lot of the commentary either. He couldn’t tell me exactly why, but I’d like to believe it was because he recognised at some level that this kind of crudity just wasn’t cool. We ultimately found out there was a way to mute individual players if you wanted to.

He still plays the game, but I’m pretty sure that when he’s out of my sight, when he’s older or when there is no one around to enforce any rules, he won’t go over to that dark side—or at least not too far. All the engagement, all the conversation, has, I think, helped him tell the difference between the gaming reality and how to behave in the offline world, how to treat people with respect.

I believe all this, even if one can never be totally sure what is going on in the inner recesses of your child’s heart and mind. And I know I’m taking a gamble, but all our bets on how to raise our children are gambles. There are no hard-and-fast rules guaranteeing success, especially in a world that changes as quickly as ours does. The best we can do is make it up as we go along, keep asking questions, keep watching and keep listening. If we stay in the game, we have a better chance of influencing how it all plays out.

Our generation didn’t behave this way, we reminisce proudly. We did as we were told, respected ourselves and others, worked hard and went to bed at a reasonable hour. We didn’t stay out clubbing ’til five in the morning, trash the streets with litter and graffiti, drink until we couldn’t stand up, harass people at train stations and dress like porn stars.

WE were great! And besides, today’s kids have everything. They should be so grateful to us that they wouldn’t even think of stepping out of line!

They have all the things we could never dream of having as kids; mobile phones, iPods, X-boxes, DVDs, Internet, pay TV, Twitter, Facebook, air conditioners, alco-pop, shopping malls, credit cards, ‘Schoolies’ at the Gold Coast and fast food galore.

Our homes have every domestic device known to humankind. The kids don’t share bedrooms, nor wash and dry dishes, nor chop kindling for the fire, nor mend their clothes. No shoes to polish, no leaves to rake, no rain to walk to school in (they don’t walk to school anyway), few dinners cooked from scratch, no boring old sandwiches in the lunchbox, no hand-me-down clothes and few siblings to share with.

If they have extra-curricular activities (and even toddlers do these days) they are driven there — no matter what age. Big, strapping lads lurch out of their mums’ 4WDs for a gruelling session at footy training (only to be picked up again by mum at the end of it all). They do have bikes, of course, but these are not for transport — they’re simply for recreation.

Unlike our parents before us, we actually talk to our kids. We relate to them. We like them to think we’re cool. We don’t have harsh rules. We want our kids to like us so we ask for their opinions and we do as they say. Why, we’ve even written bogus ‘sick notes’ to their teachers and bailed them out of mobile phone debt! We’ve let them host parties (so we could be ‘responsible’ and keep an eye on their drinking – oh, and we’ve bought the grog too). And we’ve defended them when the neighbours accused them of vomiting in their front yards. We’ve been the best parents ever! What more could they possibly need?

But if we’ve done such a great job, why do they thumb their noses at our rules, treat our homes like giant rubbish bins (or drop-in centres), eat so much junk their arteries must be popping, ignore our advice and generally cause us so much worry and angst?

Well, do you want the good news or the bad news?

The good news is that you should get an award for being so patient, hardworking and benevolent. The bad news is that said award is unlikely to be forthcoming any time soon (not unless the kids can borrow a few bucks from you to buy it).

And the second bit of bad news is that you have made this rod for your own back. Yes, you! And well, yes, me too, I have to admit.

I know you don’t want to believe that all your effort and sacrifice might be the very reason for the kids behaving badly in the first place. None of us wants to think we have done a lousy job at the most important role of all — being a parent. We all love our kids and want the best for them. We’ve even mistakenly thought that giving them everything they want is the way to do that — but we are very wrong about that.

And here’s why.

Our kids don’t need ‘stuff’; they need love and guidance much, much more than any toy, gizmo or outfit.

They don’t need us to be ‘cool’; they need us to be grown-ups. (Besides, trying to be cool can be very uncool!)

They don’t need us to defend them when they muck up; they need us to help them understand where they went wrong and how to make amends.

They don’t need us to do everything for them; they need us to teach them how to be independent and resourceful. In any case, their bodies are younger and fitter than ours!

They don’t need us to agree with everything they say and do; they need us to show them how to stick to your own rules and values — even if it makes you about as popular as Britney Spears at a Metallica concert.

They don’t need us to let them watch whatever they want on TV; they need us to show them what is appropriate for their age and stage of maturity.

They don’t need us to feed them junk food; (they already know their way to KFC anyway!); they need us to promote healthy eating and share with them the skill of cooking.

They don’t need us to drive them everywhere; walking is good exercise and a great way to socialise, learn independence and check out the boys!

They don’t need us to sanction underage drinking; they need us to encourage them to socialise in healthier ways — even if that means not socialising too much with alcohol ourselves! Ouch!

They don’t need us to encourage negative views of school (“You have waaaay too much homework, Jimmy! I’m going down there to give them a piece of my mind!”); they need us to reinforce respect for the system that supports them to learn and achieve.

They don’t need us to turn a blind eye when they walk out of the house in a skimpy, gravity-defying dress and the kind of eye-makeup we haven’t seen since the KISS years; they need us to let them know that the way we dress (whether we like it or not) does send messages to others — and sometimes not the ones we bargained for!

They don’t need us to buy them contraceptives when they hit puberty; they need us to help them develop self respect and a discerning attitude towards (eventually) sharing sexual intimacy.

They don’t need us to ignore a lazy or disinterested attitude; they need us to encourage them to contribute to their world and, ultimately, their own happiness and well being.

They don’t need us to let them do whatever they want; they need us to set sensible boundaries and to be consistent in our approach to discipline.

They don’t need us to be their ‘best friends’; they do need us to always be there for them, but they also need to form their own healthy friendships with peers.

And so, as we read all this, are we starting to feel a bit guilty yet? I know I am! And I’m sure lots of you can confess to at least one or two of these ‘sins’.

But, don’t despair. By even just considering this stuff, you are already well placed to make changes for the better. And if you are a new parent just starting out, lucky you! You have the benefit of all our mistakes to help you avoid the pitfalls.

Just remember there is no such thing as a perfect parent. (Thank goodness or I’m sure the rest of us would’ve slashed our wrists by now!) We do the best we can, with the help and advice that’s available at the time.

But for too long the advice has focused on the raising of clean, safe, well-fed, well-heeled kids with high self esteem; which is great and necessary — but is also really only half of the story. The other half is about the attitudes we are showing them.

It’s time for parents to become good role-models for their kids before it’s too late. We can’t rely on our education, government, police, medical, community or justice systems to pick up the pieces when we have failed our kids. It’s up to us to prevent it from happening in the first place.

The buck, I’m afraid, stops here!

Catherine Warnock is the author of “Hot Tips for Cool Parents: the key to raising awesome kids”(Connorcourt 2009) and writes a weekly newspaper column entitled “The Kitchen Philosopher”.



So patiently we waited, choosing a potty and leaving it casually sitting in the bathroom hoping our son would take an interest. He didn’t.

That was when he’d just turned two. Caught up with a new baby and a house move, we thought we’d not press the issue  until we were settled in to the new house. Every week, a new friend would arrive at play group or daycare in undies. “Do you want to wear undies?” We’d ask hopefully. “Don’t you want to be a big boy?” Undies were purchased and worn briefly, but still no interest in the potty.

Family were starting to ask every visit if we’d started to train him yet. “Oh, they say to do it later now,” I’d mumble in reply, ‘You were trained at one,” said my mother.

So we persisted, putting our now 2-years-and-9-months, walking, talking toddler in underpants on the weekend and smiling through gritted teeth as we cleaned yet more pee off the floor. “Don’t worry, it’s just an accident!” No potty.

Daycare began to enquire as to how we were progressing, offering to help out if we needed it. Feeling the pressure, we decided we needed to get serious. I downloaded a PDF which promised to have my son toilet trained in three days. The chief advice seemed to be to stock up on undies and barricade ourselves in the house for a weekend.

We caved after two very long days and no wee in the potty. We switched to pull-ups, which far from encouraging potty use, we found to be just a convenient and expensive marketing ploy. “Keep these dry?” said my son. “It’s a nappy.” Err, yes.

A few weekends later, we tried bribery. Not for raisins or choc drops, but proper toys. Surely this would work. And it did. Reluctantly he weed in the potty (and all over the floor) until receiving his promised fire truck. And the next day, a potty poo scored him a fire station. “It’s working!” we thought. He even started using the potty at daycare with enthusiasm. “Aren’t you a big boy!” We exclaimed, calling the grandparents to brag about our incredible toilet trainee.

But as the afterglow of the presents wore off, as did enthusiasm for toilet training. He began to relapse and refused to use the potty again. We tried negotiating.

“Sit on the potty.”

“No.”

“If you sit on the potty you can have a Tiny Teddy”

“OK”

“If you do a wee on the potty you can have two Tiny Teddies! “Nothing.

The weekends were becoming a Mexican stand-off. Hoping the dam would burst eventually, we stayed at home, not wanting to give in and put on nappies for outings. We read books on the potty, sang stupid songs. We discovered he could hold on for more than five hours. I felt humiliated and defeated at the utter ridiculousness of the situation. It seemed that every other child was happy to graduate from nappies except ours. Would he be in nappies in primary school?, we wondered.

Daycare were understanding, saying he’d get there in his own time, but wouldn’t be able to graduate to the pre-school room. A friend helpfully commented that we’d “missed the window” for toilet training and would probably have to wait until he was four. I cried. How come our bright little boy had met all his other milestones early, could count to twenty and identify five species of birds but not pee in to a bucket?

So we took another break. I read widely and interrogated every mother I knew for suggestions. We experimented a little, encouraging him to pee outside on the grass, or placing a nappy in the potty to catch the poo (that worked, once.)

Finally, we tried the good old fashioned star chart, with a column for each day of the week and rows for tiny achievements. Sitting on the potty. Washing hands. Keeping undies dry. These small little actions (along with the release of bodily fluids) earned a star. A present would be given when ten stars were achieved. Pinning the chart up to the fridge was accompanied with a pep talk about being The Boss of One’s Wee and Poo. “It is your job,” I explained, “to get the wee and poo out of your body on time and in to the potty.”"It is mummy and daddy’s job to empty the potty.”

Interestingly, putting him in charge of the process in a positive way seemed to work. The star chart was a big hit and ten starts were racked up within 24 hours. We moved the goalposts to 30 stars for the next treat, but that didn’t seem to matter so much anymore. He was taking his job very seriously, trotting off to the potty of his own accord.

I gave up on being scared about taking him out in public without nappies and simply brought along a change of pants. We tackled several public toilets that first weekend with aplomb.

Within four days, he’d mastered his own job and took over mine. One morning he went to the bathroom, slammed the door, did his business in the potty and flushed it down the loo himself. Never underestimate the keenness children have to do the gross jobs.

We’re now cruising along with few accidents a couple of weeks later and I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ve reached a point of no return with day nappies. Nights are a different matter, but we’re leaving that one alone for a while longer.

In the end it did happen in a weekend, if you ignore the six months previous trial-and-error. Of course, in the haze of parenting we usually forget how we got there, we just know that it wasn’t forever.

This psychotropic Alice blows our mind and blows Disney’s 1951 cartoon out of the water. Wonderland 2010 is a feast for the eyes; there are flowers with faces, zany birds and far-out critters (a rocking-horse humming bird is one of countless fanciful flash details). Burton blended Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and expanded on the poem “Jabberwocky” to give the story structure and dimension. But it’s the three-dimensionalised Alice — in a fabulous performance by newbie Mia Wasikowska — that gives the film its greater substance.

It was Johnny Depp who was the wild card for me. In the ad, the Mad Hatter’s bizarre garb and make-up suggested that he could be far too menacing for young kids. He looks a little like Heath Ledger’s Joker, a character who was a little too menacing for me. But beneath his orange fro, the Mad Hatter has a skittish kindness. Kids will find him really weird, but before long he becomes Alice’s friend — a scarecrow to her Dorothy. Yes, every character is berserk and initially unsettling. But, as Alice’s father told her when she was young, “All the best people are bonkers.” Crazy’s just another word for free-spirited creativity. Before it’s clear who is a good guy and who’s a bad guy, young kids might be a bit on edge. But even the frightening Bandersnatch, with his drooly canine mouth and razor sharp claws, becomes a helpmate to Alice.

As the Red Queen, Helena Bonham Carter is a sheer delight. Her giant bulbous head is one of the film’s best special effects. Her absurd commands and predilections (like using live animals as furniture) would be creepy if they weren’t so funny. She’s just bratty — a quality that kids find very amusing in adults. Anne Hathaway’s White Queen is a somewhat spaced-out version of Glinda the Good. She’s trippy, but little kids will love her sparkly princess-ness. The dreaded Jabberwocky — a flying dragon-ish beast — is the movie’s scariest part and may freak out kids under 6 or 7 (and older scaredy-cats). His icky demise involves the severing of both his tongue and his head.

Linda Woolverton, the screenwriter for The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, also wrote the Alice. Here Alice has returned to Wonderland at the age of 19, having first visited at the age of 7. It’s such a smart twist. At 19, Alice is better equipped to cope; if she was 7, children might too readily project themselves into her parentless adventure. At 19, Alice is a young woman about to be shoved into a suitable Victorian marriage with a comically gross suitor. The rabbit hole is her escape hatch that takes her from a snooty high-society party to a battlefield where she retrieves the sought-after sword and saves the day – like a feminist King Arthur with his Excalibur. This is a film you’ll want your daughter to see instead of Hannah Montana.

As Alice drinks this and eats that, she goes from big to small and back again, as children do, maturing and regressing. At first, the gang in Wonderland aren’t convinced she is the right Alice. They’ve been waiting for the return of Alice to dethrone the evil Red Queen. But this Alice is reluctant; she is “hardly Alice.” Recalling the 7-year-old, the Mad Hatter tells Alice, “You were much more muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.” Which is in fact, the heart-wrenching truth about growing up isn’t it? We come to find out Wonderland is actually called Underland. At 7, Alice mistakenly called it the wrong name. It’s a tidbit that reflects so much about the perceptions of children and adults.

Like Where the Wild Things Are this is a film about childhood as well as being a film that will enchant children. If your kid isn’t old enough, see it alone.

— Mother of Anon

Dear Mother of Anon,

People fantasise about what to name their babies for years before they get pregnant, but the reality can be somewhat less fantastic. You want to choose a name you feel really good about — a name that fits the kind of boy you imagine you might have. That’s no small amount of pressure. As pregnancy progresses, you’re bombarded with options and statistics: names that are so in they’re over, names about to be so in they will be over, names that were never in for good reason, and so on. Not to mention scads of people chiming in with their opinions and muddying up your instincts.

Pregnancy is chock-full of decisions, and expecting couples will often find that they’ve latched on to one of these decisions with disproportionate energy and angst. Stroller selection can eat up weeks of billable hours. Swatches for the nursery walls can lead to tears. Partly this is due to the information-overloaded culture we live in. When there are 900,000 strollers to choose from, how do you decide? (The answer, of course, is to let our experts do the work for you).

But mostly the over-thinking comes from just wanting to do right by your yet-to-be-born kid. You’re not nuts, you just care — A LOT. If you see the root of the anxiety as something sweet and loving, it can lift the burden a little and help you calm down, which, in turn, might help you decide.

There are millions of names out there, not to mention the increasingly common option of inventing your own. Some practical advice: Narrow the possibilities. Give yourself some parameters: first initials, ending sounds, unique spellings, names that connect to experiences you’ve shared, to one of your families or pasts, etc. Prioritising will bring the list to a manageable length. You can always widen your net if you’re not finding anything that fits.

Context is important. Think about the last name — the arrangement of sounds and syllables and how to complement them. Always remember to say the full name aloud as well as look at it written down. You may also have to let go of some of the context you’ve been carrying around, namely, name baggage. Your man loves Trevor, but that’s the name of the kid who gave you a wedgie at swim team practice in 1985. Ray is simply lovely, but will you always think of Romano when you say it? And the family names? You might not remember your Grandpa Henry fondly, but it’s a pretty great name! The fact is, when you name your son Trevor or Ray or Henry those other associations will soon fade. The power of your child to take over complete ownership of a name is significant. This goes for you and the others in his life. If you have a strong, truly horrible association — was Trevor’s wedgie the worst moment of your childhood? — maybe forget it. But it might be worth letting a middling connection go and trusting your yet-to-be-born child will inhabit his name in his own time and way.

Another thing you can do is stop talking to people about the name choice. This is YOUR boy, not your neighbor’s. Who cares if you neighbor’s idiot ex-husband was named Dashiell? You like it, you can use it. Though if you do want more concrete information about names — pronunciation, origin, root meaning, popularity and popular associations, check out Baby Name Wizard.

Time pressure is a common feeling at the end of pregnancy no matter what. Sometimes the deadline is just what an indecisive couple needs; you make your life easier if you fill out the birth certificate form in the hospital, so make a decision already! That said, you can actually file for the birth certificate later, and you can change a name on a birth certificate — we know people who’ve done it. There may have been a few titters at the time, but now they’ve got a kid with the name they love, and who cares about what you called Junior in the first month? Not to encourage any more vacillation, but the real deadline is a little more flexible than you might think.

Clearly, though, the decision has taken on some deep meaning for you, so it’s quite possible that your feelings about “getting the right name” might not lift as soon as the certificate is signed. It is completely normal for a name to feel “weird” or “wrong” for a while after the baby is born. He has yet to own his name. You have yet to say it a million times, to hear other people say it, to hear him say it himself. But once you do, there’s a pretty good chance that whatever name you pick is going to feel very right.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com.au

As you researched the book, how did your pre-conceived notions about children and medication break down?

My idea for this book was born of observations in my community in Washington, D.C. seeing pre-school age children with various conditions going to all kinds of therapies. I’d also heard of older kids taking medication for various problems. It all seemed crazy to me. With the competitive nature of our community and parents trying to perfect their kids, it seemed to me that the two were related. I thought the whole thing was a sign of social pathology.

But when I started working on the book, I found that the experts didn’t necessarily think what I thought. You would find these quotes in the media about, say, ADHD [attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder] being a flavour-of-the-month diagnosis. I realise now there is only a very small minority of doctors who believe this — but they get a lot of press. Overall, most experts say the real problem is under-diagnosis. Also, medication truly helps many children: Twenty years of scientific research have shown, for example, that antidepressant medication, when coupled with cognitive-behavioral therapy, works for 60 to 80 percent of children suffering from depression and anxiety disorders. So I kept shifting my idea for the book; I kept trying to make my original idea hold water.

You’re thinking really changed, though, when you started talking to parents.

Right. I went to a meeting in Silver Spring, Maryland — it was for a group I’d found called “Should I Worry?” It was billed as a meeting for parents who were anxious about their children’s progress and wondering whether they had issues. As it turned out, though, these were parents with children with very serious mental health problems in the public school system; they were desperate to find a life raft. They were using medication for their children because otherwise their children would be locked away. I just started crying in the car on the way home. I felt I had absorbed so much misery of a kind I had never experienced before.

The key here is not whether medication is good or bad but: What did the parents go through? What did the children go through? I realised I had to talk to more parents. Once I did, the emotional reality emerged. They had all gone through a long emotionally-wrenching journey with their children. Let’s say ADHD is the most benign of the mental health disorders children can have — it still can have really serious ramifications. I write about one ten-year-old girl who’d been formally diagnosed with ADHD — she sobbed for weeks over the distress she felt in doing her homework and begged her parents to run her over with their car. Her parents remain conflicted about whether to give her medication — they haven’t yet. The situation has completely drained the family.

More often, however, I would hear that medication made families’ lives a lot better. The key here is not whether medication is good or bad but: What did the parents go through? What did the children go through? What was the thought process leading up to their decision to have their children take medication?

What people tend to assume is that kids who are just distracted or jumpy are given medication.

Exactly. When we talk eye-rollingly about badly behaved, fidgety kids, we’re completely missing the reality of what is going on for these families. One woman spoke to me about her nine-year-old boy who was eventually diagnosed with Asperger’s. She didn’t want to believe that anything was wrong with him — she assumed that others were putting out-of-whack expectations on him. But she had to confront the problem when her son’s teacher told her that he’d been banging his head on the ground and repeating back what people were saying, reversing pronouns and repeating lines from movies and TV — all typical ways autistic children speak. The main thing that doesn’t come through in the media coverage of children’s mental health issues is the fact that people are really suffering.

Why do you think the media is invested in promoting an image of parents giving medication to their children when they don’t measure up to their expectations in some way?

For one, I think the media is made up of people like me who share the same prejudices of society at large so, for the most part, they’re just people who haven’t necessarily had the exposure to these issues to know what is going on. Also, the behavior of the pharmaceutical companies has been so bad. It has made for a long string of valid stories about their bad behavior in the press, as in the case of Harvard psychiatry professor Joseph Biederman who, after pioneering aggressively medicating kids, was found to be in the pocket of the drug companies. But this kind of press has also made it easier to conflate what the drug companies are doing, which is basically pushing medication at all costs, with what psychiatrists are doing. Too often, we let the drug companies dictate how we see mental health issues today.

In your opinion, are any children being overmedicated?

There are populations where over-medication is going on. Children on [medical benefits], for example, are being given anti-psychotics at a much higher rate than upper-middle-class children. But the press is mainly about upper-middle-class families. I’ve found if you say what everybody already thinks, people will rally to what you’re saying and celebrate it as truth.

The experience of having a child with real mental health issues — as opposed to regular everyday anxieties or depressions — is a very foreign experience; it’s hard to have compassion and empathy for something completely foreign to you. And it’s scary. We really want to believe that if children have problems, then their parents did something to cause their problems. The idea is that your parents screw you up — it’s hard-wired into us — so that when you hear about children with problems, your first thought is, “The mother must work too many hours” or “The parents are too competitive” or “They’re cold.” Of course, parents do have the ability to make their children happy or unhappy, but there is also a biological predisposition and temperament. The interplay between environment and what is inborn is a very important relationship. As I say in the book, the main paradigm for understanding the interplay of genes and environment now is “biology loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger.” But we want the narrative that explains it all away. We like to believe we can protect against this.

But we don’t know the long-term effects of these medications on brain development, right?

We do know that with all these drugs — SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] included — there are side effects for the adults and children who take them. But you’re right in the long term, we don’t know. So this is part of the torture that parents go through in deciding to put their kids on medication.

What advice would you give parents who are trying to get appropriate care for their mentally ill children?

There are a lot of online communities for parents of children with various issues, and advocacy organizations like the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill where parents can get the help they’re entitled to. In public schools, for example, it’s a question of knowing how to work the system and what your rights are, who to talk to, how to stand up for your child, what forms to request, etc.

Paediatricians can also make recommendations for mental health specialists and can track the child over time. It’s important to have somebody else keeping an eye out, watching what works and doesn’t. But how many pediatricians, especially ones who accept health insurance, take that kind of time? The average pediatrician visit is 11 minutes. There has to be a way for longer visits to exist and be reimbursed.

There are also terrific books out there. For example, Making the System Work for Your Child with ADHD by Peter Jensen really lays out for parents what to do to get help.

So you would argue that children in fact are not being over-medicated?

Ninety five percent of American children are not being medicated at all. You might say, “Well 5% is still 1 in 20,” but that doesn’t make an argument for gross over-medication.

Look, nobody wants to stuff their kids full of chemicals. Nobody wants to interfere in ways that nobody understands with the growth of their kids’ brains. But for doctors who work with these kids and see how they suffer — and how limited their lives are — and then see how medication and therapy can bring these kids more of a full childhood, a “normal” life, one the child deserves to have — if we have that choice, why would we deprive children of those experiences?

To celebrate, we have one fantastic prize pack including the Handy Manny: Tooling Around DVD, plus a Talkin’ Tool Kits, Talkin’ Tool Boxes and Let’s Get to Work Manny dolls thanks to Fisher-Price, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse figurines and so much more!

To enter, simply tell us in 25 words or less who the “handy one” in your household is.

Entries close March 12. Good luck! And remember to read the terms and conditions before entering.

From now on, you can attend and participate in the only international online meetings of The Pissed-Off Parents Club right here.

The what-off club? The Pissed-Off Parents Club, that’s what! Where men and women, mums and dads, males and females of all genders and ages can meet and bleat.

Oh yes! Finally – FINALLY -someone’s had the good sense to give us parents a forum (the comments boxes below) to have a rant and a rave and a good old bitch about the sometimes really shitty (quite literally) business of being a parent. Thankyou www.babble.com.au, thankyou!

But it’s not all beer and spittle being a pissed-off parent. Oh no. Being a Pissed-Off Parent costs – and right here’s where you start paying. In whinges. And moans. And whines. Yep – right here’s where you can get all those things off your chest that really get on your tits as a parent.

You can be pregnant for the first time – or the eighth, a mum of two who’s at her wits end, a stay-at-home father of four whose wife just doesn’t understand him…whoever you are and wherever you’re writing from, we know you’ll have some stories from the more frustrating side of life to tell about your experience as a parent in the 21st century – so go on! Let rip!

Just think of it as your turn to chuck a tantie – in cyberspace, where your screaming won’t wake the baby.

Oh, and by the way, the hilarious and refreshing book that tells it like it is and inspired this post, is called, um, The Pissed-Off Parents Club by Mink Elliott and is published by Sphere. It’s available in all good bookshops – as well as some of the dodgier ones – now, for just $22.99.

Six years ago Julie and I started a program called the Tinkering School — based on the notion that kids could be trusted with tools like hammers and real material — which was us basically wondering if we had anything to offer to kids in the way of educational experience. And in building these large complicated projects we would have the opportunity to create meaningful learning experiences in the contexts of these big projects. It’s been more successful than I expected.

In the pre-amble of the video, you talk about the dangers of overprotecting our children and what potential negative side effects we might see after a generation or two. What are those side effects?

I think the greatest problem we encounter is that kids are deprived of the very experiences that form the foundation of creative, innovative thinking. Those channels affect problem-solving abilities and persistence. Being allowed to play with fire is exactly where your [child’s] understanding of the world and of physics and principles of engineering and art come forth. So when you don’t let kids climb trees or you don’t let them put their arms out the window to feel the wind, you’re actually preventing them from developing interest in the world around them.

But do you think it’s irresponsible to be advocating dangerous activities for kids?

I invented a term so that we can talk about this in a more rational way. The term is derived from a book called Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows by Melanie Joy, which is about carnism [the psychology that animals were put in the world for the sole purpose of feeding and entertaining humans]. So I use the word “dangerism.” You heard it here first.

And what does that mean?

Dangerism explores how society decides what is and isn’t dangerous. Just like in carnism, there’s often no rationality for why we eat pigs but don’t eat dogs. You only have to go half-way around the globe to find the opposite experience: they eat dogs but they don’t eat pigs. If you were an alien and you landed there, you wouldn’t know what that culture eats and doesn’t eat. In the same way, what we consider to be dangerous changes over time and from culture to culture. In India, it’s common to find people who consider it very dangerous to ride a bicycle and yet the children are allowed to run around barefoot.

As I meet more families from around the world, I find nobody can agree on what’s a dangerous topic in this book. For some, it’s clearly social dangers, so topic number four — learn how to kiss like the French — is difficult because it encourages children and adults to share a close physical space when they greet each other. For others, it’s simply throwing rocks because it’s an encouragement of hooliganism. Another person told me that [encouraging] putting pennies on the railroad tracks is like telling kids to go and play baseball on the freeway, whereas other families have already done this.

I was recently in Wyoming chatting with a science teacher. On a typical weekend, her children — nine and twelve — leave the house at nine in the morning carrying a backpack with water, a sack lunch, and a flashlight. And I said, “Really? Your son is out there in the wilderness and you’re not worried?” And she said, “Well, at least they’re not going to the mall!”

That’s so interesting.

It is! And that’s when I started to think about the cultural differences of the perception of danger and how arbitrary they were. You only have to compare that to the folks who drop their kids off at the mall and pick them up at the end of the day. It’s a complete dichotomy — what is and isn’t dangerous.

Do you think the pay-offs from these activities are worth the risk of kids getting hurt?

I do. For every topic we have an excessive analysis of the possible risks, and part of that is we want to show kids that when you’re about to undertake something, it’s worth thinking, Okay, how can this go wrong, and what do we do when it does? Every activity in the book is put in that framework. And the point of it is to say, yes, there are meaningful learning experiences in all of these activities that far outweigh the risks.

But do you think the same lessons could be learned by engaging in non-dangerous activities?

There are alternative ways to learn everything kids can learn in this book.

So why the shock value?

Partly to raise awareness about just how dangerous overprotection is. Partly, to show that if I tell a twelve-year-old, “Hey! I’m going to teach you how to pay attention better in school and how to focus,” that child is going to run away as fast as they can. But if I say, “Hey! I’m going teach you how to whittle,” I’m going to have the undivided attention of that child for hours. So in some way you need big people’s imagination in order to get their attention. The book is a combination manifesto and call to action for parents who want to help their kids engage with the world and discover things for themselves, [but] also for overprotected children to have something they can hold up and say, “Look. Other kids are doing it and I want to be able to do it too. Let’s figure out how we can do it together.”

Let me ask you a question. Don’t try to over-think it. How early in a child’s life would you be comfortable giving a child a knife?

Well, it depends what kind of knife it is. Is it a plastic knife?

It’s a pocket knife.

My instinct is certainly not for awhile.

Yeah. There’s something in you — and something in me as well — such that when we consider the notion, what comes to mind is all the terrible things that can happen with a knife. Maybe the phrase “poke out an eye out,” comes to mind. I think we are programmed with that.

But honestly at some point, every person is going to own a knife. For some, it will be when they graduate and rent their first apartment. For others, if you were raised in Northern Canada, for instance, it would be when you’re a toddler and were given a sharpened knife to cut blubber into bite-sized pieces since you can’t tear it with your feet. There’s a spectrum here that we’re considering. I’m not saying we should give toddlers knives. I’m just saying that the context in which something seems like a disaster in the making is actually a common everyday occurrence. And we need to look at where [parents] draw that line because if you draw that line too late in life, you’ll end up with someone in the kitchen who has no knife experience and for them, cooking is a dangerous activity.

You’re not a parent yourself. Do people ever criticise you and say, how can you possibly understand until you’ve had a child?

I believe as a society we’re all responsible for our children and that it’s up to everybody to keep these children safe, to help them have meaningful learning experiences, and to keep them from catastrophic harm.

So you agree that as a society and as parents, we have an obligation to keep our kids safe?

Yeah, we do. But what is your definition of safe? Does it include scrapes and breaks and bumps and bruises? When we only let children play in the playgrounds and give them plastic tools to work with instead of real tools, then they only understand the world in terms of these proximities that we’ve given them. The range of creative expression and the experiences they have to draw on are not deep. I get that parents need to protect their children, but when it extends to overprotection, we deprive our children of the very experiences that are going to make them capable of changing the world.