Several major life events have conspired to keep me away from printculture for so long and I've found it exceedingly difficult to get back into the writing game, despite telling myself that I should really just sit down and get started. So here I am. How to start? The biggest game changer was the birth of our child last summer TWO summers ago. In fact, the printculture cohort has been having something of a baby boomlet, with two recent arriva...

An article in the New York Times Magazine claims experimental verification for the idea that very small children are able to tell right from wrong. This, if true, would be wonderful posthumous news for Mencius, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other believers in the basic goodness of human nature. It would also, I imagine, help to reduce the anxiety of new parents who fear they are not doing an adequate job of turning their little blobs of cuteness i...

It's been a snowy day in New Haven-- the kind of slow, flocculous snow that hangs in the tree branches and makes everything look clean and soft. And though this landscape will change, it's a good one to put before the as yet unfocused eyes of this young man, born last night. We think he is a cheerful, curious, friendly sort, the kind of human you'd be glad to welcome into your species. Please do.

Reading about a multiple-murder case from Texas and the ensuing discussion on Metafilter, I wax comparative and sociological. The story's banal except in the outcome: two teenage lovers are forbidden to see each other by the girl's parents, and the kids break the rule. The horror is in the breakage they performed: the boy and girl showed up one night with some buddies at the girl's house, killed the parents and the younger brothers and torched...

My daughter's preschool class cast their votes for president the same Tuesday that everyone else did. I'm not sure when her teachers called it for the Democrat, but the outcome was the same as the official one only more so: Obama 13; McCain 4. I wasn't all that surprised by the result (her school is in lower Manhattan, after all). But I was struck by how tenacious the moment was for her. She'll happily tell you who she voted for and who ...

I've been thinking a bit about Obama's grandmother lately. Not about her specifically-- I never knew her-- but about the number of children raised by their grandparents when the parents are dead, absent, or out of whack. This family pattern has most often been presented in the newspapers as characteristic of poor people, more specifically poor people of color; but it ain't necessarily so. (I, a well-to-do old whitey, was partly raised by my ma...

Part 1: The Arms Race (*metaphor stolen from Henry Em) Before I left Seoul I had planned to write a follow-up portrait of my experience with the education system there. If first grade was about the training of protocol and relationships between people in the system, second grade, for me, was about the training of academic anxiety. In my first-grade post I was able to watch the jockeying for status and alliance as well as the expression of acad...

For a few years now we’ve had this bedtime ritual: we take turns saying five things we’re thankful for. As I sat down to write this I couldn’t remember why we began the practice; but looking back at my old blogs I see that it was a response to W’s increasing desire for the things (and brands) his friends had. I wanted to take some time each day to acknowledge and appreciate what we already had. His first list (made while in the bathroom brushi...

We spend the year straddled across three countries — a month or two in the U.S., three of four shorter journeys to visit my dad in Shanghai, and most of the rest of the time here in Seoul. Everyday my older son does his homework for his regular Korean school, then extra homework I assign him for English and Chinese. The daily practice maintains or improves his language skills, but the travel is what keeps him tethered to these places, th...

The journey doesn’t end when the wheels of the plane touch down. It is only noon in San Francisco, and we will try to push through until evening to straighten out our internal clocks. I have not yet slept and my back is killing me from a muscle I pulled before getting on the flight, worsened by eleven hours of immobility. We move, zombie-like, through immigration and customs. I am always relieved when this is over; some guilty part of me expec...

I want to start by thanking Cat for putting her virtual finger on something that had been pulsing in my brain but I hadn’t been able to see clearly or articulate. She commented: As a first-time mom, I felt inundated with messages that I had to establish a routine and surround my daughter with familiar things. So, it was hard to get my mind around taking her on a plane trip that would a) fubar her nap schedule and b) put her in a weird place.

The first in what I anticipate will be an ongoing series in which I dispense unsolicited advice and opinions on traveling with young kids, based solely on my own meandering experience. “Can I have your zip code?” The cashier asks me while sneaking a glance at her watch. “I live out of the country.” “Oh!” she says, momentarily interested. “Where?” “Korea.” “Oh.” [Not that glamourous, is what she’s probably thinking. Or: Why would anyone want to...

I recently discovered a website called Kids in Mind, which rates movies for parents so they can determine whether they are appropriate for their children to watch. Their rating system is much more complicated than G-PG-R. Each movie gets three numbers, one for Sex & Nudity, one for Violence & Gore and one for Profanity. Fifteen movies scored a perfect ten in the first category.

“Dear Santa,” W wrote, “Please eat some milk and cookies. I need to check that you are here. Love, W.” Holidays and lying go together like cookies and milk. While W hasn’t yet figured out that Santa has the same terrible penmanship as his mother, I have begun to spend a lot of time covering for mythical creatures. I do my best to explain Santa’s omniscience and his ability to break into our chimney-less apartment, and the morning after being ...

After recently hearing the German word “das Baby” I began thinking about a cultural studies book I don’t want to write and probably wouldn’t even want to read (sounds like a printuculture post): The History of “Baby” or, to give it a more contemporary ring: Baby: A Natural History. How Baby Got Brought Up? The story would begin with Baby’s slow, near-fatal suffocation of its older and larger sibling Babe. The OED’s oldest examples of “baby” go...

My oldest child W began elementary school in March (the school year begins in March in Korea). For months before this moms with older children had been telling me (with a maniacal gleam of the eye), “Oh you’re going to be really BUSY from now on.” As anyone even tangentially integrated into the Ajuma* network of Seoul knows, education is a big deal and a huge source of pressure here. We had always planned to send our kids to local school; we w...

Time-out time. I kneel down in front of W (age 6), eye to eye, naming my emotions and trying to foster empathy in him. “Let me explain why I am frustrated. I am frustrated because... blah blah blah...” His eyes wander, he wiggles around, his arms, searching for activity, automatically run through the taekwondo forms. Or his nervous habits appear: biting his nails, picking his fingers, blowing spit bubbles. This drives me nuts. Can’t you listen...

As a young boy in Seoul my husband K ran around in the streets playing soccer with his friends, blissfully ignorant of time and responsibility. But at dinner time the smell of cooking rice from all the houses in his neighborhood would call him home.

I spend about ten months of the year thirty miles south of the DMZ, and the rest of the time, for the sake of my children’s English, my own sanity, and my need to fulfill all my repressed dietary cravings (reuben sandwiches, burritos, raspberries) I pack the bags, bribe the kids, and board the plane to return to the suburbs of the U.S. where I grew up. Among other transformations, I’ve noticed this one: as I go about my day-to-day mommy tasks ...

My son W is very picky about his shoes. From a young age he cultivated a fine and mysterious sense of what shoes are fit to adorn his feet and which ones he won't wear. Soon after we arrived in Seoul he chose white leather sneakers, which amused my in-laws to no end, a cross between the traditional white-colored shoes that people in the countryside wear, and 70s throwback sneakers with flat bottoms.

The three common characteristics I find in most children’s entertainment are mischief, animal friends and deparenting.