Having kids over

I'm not sure what to make of this ruling as it is always hard to get the story from news accounts. But a NSW court awarded $853,396 in damages to a boy who fell from a bunk-bed while on a sleep-over. The claim is that there was no ladder but it does raise the whole notion of a duty of care will taking care of other people's children. For professional services, they get insurance for precisely this sort of thing but no one else ever thinks to do so. The story certainly gives one pause.

Parenting through the ages

In the New Yorker this week, a very interesting article about parenting magazines and books. Jill Lepore looks at a couple of recent parenting books and the origins of parenting advice. She argues that prior to the 20th century, larger families meant that many children had already had a great deal of parenting experience rearing their siblings. When this change, the demand for external advice rose. That suggests to me that we don't want to protect our children from parenting duties themselves. Hooray, now I can feel far less guilty about ordering my 10 year old to supervise bath time for her younger siblings.

Hannah Montana: The Enterprise

I took the children to see Hannah Montana: The Movie. (Yes, I know it has been out in the US for months but it has only just been released in Australia; part of Disney's strategy to give Australians a moral incentive to pirate). I must admit that I was quite emotional about it. I sat there through the whole thing in disbelief at the beauty of the entire story, the poignant images, the subtle and not so subtle tensions. I just can't convey the incredible feeling to gives me to see something like this put together. Hannah Montana is as close to perfection as a business and marketing idea that I have ever seen. I cannot imagine any economist or business school professor sitting through this with a dry eye.

For those who don't know, Hannah Montana is a pop-star who is actually the alter-ego of Miley Stewart who is played by Miley Cyrus the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus who himself plays Miley's father (Stewart that is) calling himself Robby Ray until frankly it is hard to know what is going on. Suffice it to say, in this I join the majority of the world (in the TV show/movie that is) who also don't know that Miley (Stewart) is actually Hannah Montana although I'm pretty sure that I know that Miley Cyrus is both of them depending upon whether she is wearing a wig or not.

Anyhow, why create this confusion? Well, Miley (Stewart but presumably not Cyrus) wants to have "the best of both worlds." Which worlds? Well, the first is being a superstar with all of the perks. And then, apparently, that isn't enough to get to a global optimum so she also wants to attend school with her celebrity life concealed so she can lead a 'normal' life. The point of the TV show is she leads that normal life to the extent that she doesn't and is continually being faced with challenges of how to conceal it all and maintain what increasingly looks like the best of neither worlds as any superhero who has tried to do the same thing could have told you.

Now as you watch this you can see just how perfectly it appeals to the tween set. Miley, apparently ordinary, is actually not but is happy to protect and defend her right to be seen as ordinary by her, otherwise quite annoying, school peers because that is somehow better than not being ordinary leaving tweens with the no-so-subtle message that maybe they should appreciate what they have got except that really what they have got is something ordinary, they are seen to be ordinary and don't have that extra fun and hijinks that Miley (Stewart and Cyrus) seem to have. She sings "who would have thought that a girl like me, would double as a superstar?" to which the answer is being conveyed as no-one to which I as an outside observer answer, well everyone and the children appear to get that whole irony too.

Disney have put together a perfect marketing storm. It sits so well with the struggle that age group has regarding peer recognition, excitement, and wealth inequality, that it is hard to imagine anything better targeted. Add to that they actually created Hannah Montana (the actual pop sensation rather than the TV show concept) and the whole thing is staggering. And yes, you even get to sell blonde wigs in spades! Indeed, they are totally upfront in this. In the movie, Robby (or is it Billy?) Ray says to Miley (I give up) that "we created Hannah Montana so you could do this" and I nearly fell out of my chair. You mean, "do this" as in "rake it in," right? But the point is Hannah Montana is a creation and they can even throw that straight at us.

Which brings me back to the movie which only my 4 year old claimed she was excited to be seeing. My 10 year old daughter watches Hannah Montana repeatedly and mimics her expressions but apparently is not allowed to be excited about her anymore as that honor is reserved only for Harry Potter. My 8 year old son, always seems to be watching Hannah Montana although he claims it is by some sort of accident that occurs when it is on the TV that he can't avoid seeing it even though apparently he would very much want to. It was he who laughed hardest throughout the movie.

The movie deals with Robby (and probably not Billy) Ray getting frustrated that Miley is getting too into Hannah and forgetting "her roots." Her punishment for this is to be rooted back in Tennessee and embroiled in life there including -- and this mandatory for these movies -- being reminded of her mother's passing and having that old life threatened by an evil developer which ironically requires her Hannah Montana life to get them all out of that jam. A few songs and a painted chicken coop later, and Miley (Stewart) faces a moment in which she decides to throw it all away and give up the Hannah Montana franchise. And I have to tell you that I held my breath in stunned disbelief at that moment as I thought, "OMG, if she does this, Disney are giving up the whole game too." If she reveals who she really is, the whole franchise will collapse. And for a few minutes I wondered if the whole movie was Miley (Cyrus) giving up the game.

[SPOILER ALERT FOR NEXT PARAGRAPH] But it turned out that her adoring fans did not want that and all 5,000 of them at the small town benefit concert promised to keep her secret if she would just put that damn wig back on and get singing. More implausibly, a (British of course) tabloid reporter decided to forgo millions and do the same thing. The town and franchise were saved. Phew!

So we live to fight another day. For parents, this is a movie you can sit through without dying. (Although you will be likely stuck with that Hoedown song in your head for days). But don't expect to be free of the whole Hannah Montana thing anytime soon.

Oh-nomics

An article in today's New York Times on "Titlenomics":

The release of “womenomics” (by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay) this month is just the latest example of publishers trying to knock off the title of “Freakonomics,” the best-selling 2005 book by Steven D. Levitt, an economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a journalist.

Although some critics initially complained about that book’s “annoying title,” “Freakonomics” was an instant success, generating, among other things, a column in The New York Times Magazine, a blog on the Times Web site (freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com), and a planned documentary.

So it’s no surprise that other authors hope to benefit from the reflected glory. Last summer “Obamanomics” and “Slackonomics” appeared. This year “Invent-onomics 101” made its debut. And in the fall “Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays” will hit bookstores.

They mentioned every 'onomics title in existence but Parentonomics. It is hardly a route to getting a best seller if you can't even score the reflected glory of a rip-off story!

Actually, I think there is actually little commercial value to choosing titles these ways and in retrospect I'm surprised that no publisher questioned it for Parentonomics and suggested something else. It was always a natural title as I wrote the book but perhaps there is something that might have given a more accurate indication of the book's content. From the 42 Amazon.com reviewers, it seems that the title did some harm as many of them were expecting something like Freakonomics which is a very different book. For starters, it is about things away from the norm whereas Parentonomics is all about the norm. Ironically, Freakonomics stands for something serious in those reviewers' eyes which I guess to many academic economists it is a title of whimsy -- not that there is anything wrong with that.

Then again, the NYT piece suggests that there is something wrong with similarity between titles. I'm not sure. If used correctly, it can surely convey how a book stands relative to others. The variants of 'e'conomics often do that and I hope they keep coming.

Full of ideas

Scott Adams keeps coming up with the neat ideas. This time on de-cluttering:

My other de-cluttering idea is what I call the Toy Jail. It's a closet beneath the stairs where I plan to toss anything found downstairs that doesn't belong there. In any given day the family drags in many pounds of miscellaneous stuff that is, for one reason or another, too valuable to discard, and too worthless to have its own space in the house. Generally your home has no established storage area for miscellaneous, odd-shaped, crapinalia. In our new home, that sort of thing will find a final resting place in the Toy Jail, along with any toy that should have been put away and wasn't. When the Toy Jail gets full, we'll probably have to move.

Of course, in Australia, officially this would be a Toy Gaol.

This is your brain on Lego

We aren't quite at the stage of these parents in this video but we had the 'Lego moment' whereby you realise that you are not buying Lego for the kids but for yourselves.Let me tell you once you can categorise a purchase under 'family activity' the sky's the limit. For us, every single Star Wars lego set has been purchased and all the ones that have been built are on display. But it doesn't stop there. Here was our project last weekend -- 2500 pieces built by myself and my 8 year old son and not a single game of chess played.

Negative christmas

As regular readers know, I have long been concerned about the growth in useless stuff that comes with children. In our household, I am the only one who throws out stuff. I have to go on annual raids of various closets and toy boxes and do a cull.

Today, Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) proposes a day for a limited version of this called 'Negative Christmas.'

I just invented a new holiday. It's called Negative Christmas. On this day, rather than giving gifts, you can force a family member or friend to discard one item that he or she already owns. The selected item might be a hideous shirt that you consider an abomination, or that pair of bedroom slippers that are an insult to all footwear. The idea is that the unrecipient should be better off without the item you ungift.

He proposes June 25 as the date for this. I have one question: do you have to celebrate Christmas to be part of this one?

Learning to argue

One of the things we decided early on as parents is that our children would not be discouraged from arguing. Indeed, they would be rewarded if they made good points by winning. I had been meaning to post about this for some time especially as our 4 year old has the ability to argue relatively coherently while engaged in a full-flung trantrum. It is an amazing ability and a sight to see but given that she is coupling good argument with a trantrum, she doesn't get to win.

Anyhow, this piece by Jay Heinrichs does a better job than my (perhaps never to be written) post could possibly have done. I recommend it highly as it describes the philosophy of the approach, how to teach your kids to argue and peppers it with some classic arguments.