How do your kids get to school? How did you get to school when you were a kid? Taking the yellow school bus, walking or riding a bike may all seem like normal methods of getting to school. In the modern world, we drive and carpool as well. But what about in urban environments where a lot of parents don't drive or even own a car? They take the subway.

And they do it ALONE. That's right--I've seen it myself. Kids popping onto and off of the subway without a parent in sight. How do they manage it? And why, you might wonder, do their parents let them do it? Well, necessity is the mother of invention and a lot of other things, it turns out. Kids are going in one direction, their parents in another (to school versus work), and the main way to get around town in New York, for example, is underground.

Turns out, it's probably safer too. Driving in this city is a disaster on a good day. You're a LOT less likely to get into an accident on the subway than you are in your car. Plus, the kids tend to travel in packs on the subway. I never see a kid get onto an empty car at an odd (non-rush hour) time. They pick which car to meet up on and collect as the train makes its stops toward their final destination. I know because I can hear them screeching above my iPod.

Need some pencils for the new school year? How about a ruler? If you've got a cent, you can get them -- at Staples and OfficeMax, respectively, in some areas. Target regularly offers school supplies for next to nothing in the weeks leading up to the start of the school year. (Wanna meet a teacher? Hit Target at 8am on a Sunday in August -- they'll be there stocking up on pencil boxes, crayons, and -- literally -- hundreds of folders for their classrooms.)

As the economy nose dives, parents aren't rushing out to buy brand new supplies when last year's zizzors (as my daughter calls them) work just fine. Retailers are running scared and are offering lots of "loss leaders" -- items priced below their cost -- to get shoppers in the door. This is nothing new, of course -- it happens every year -- but this year retailers are dropping prices even more than usual, even to the point of offering products for free.

Naturally, the stores are hoping you'll buy other, more profitable items while you're there and that's usually the case. Still, if your kid's backpack still holds books and their binders still hold paper, do you really need new ones? Are you buying all new supplies or making do with what you have as much as possible?

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Being overweight is tough for a kid. There are many options toward weight loss, but some are more (or less) appealing than others. For many, over the years, the weight-loss camp has been a dream. But, while "fat camp" is almost as American as apple pie, it's now going the way of many other American dreams--it's too darned expensive to attend. Like any other camp, weight-loss camp costs money to run and maintain. With more than nine million children who are considered obese in this country, such camp can seem like a knight in shining armor for families struggling to get their kids' weight under control. The weight-loss camps, while they can be affective, are far from free. Few to none accept insurance.

The government generally offers no more assistance than insurance companies. Instead the children rely on their essay writing skills and other means to win scholarships to attend. Yes, even weight loss camp is something only possible for the rich. Corporate sponsorship is one way to help get kids who can't afford the often more than $1,000-a-week pricetag what they need. Advocacy groups are being formed, such as the Childhood Obesity Treatment in Action. Some tax deductions are coming into play, and some insurance is starting to cover a portion of the cost--mostly in the cognitive behavior area.

But is it enough? Rarely. And financial cost is to say nothing of the emotional cost to the children, who are often left with either feeling exploited by their situation--their essays and their experiences become the property of the camp, who share that information freely with the media in hopes of growing the industry--and/or have to deal with life after camp, which can be even harder than before they found their salvation. While most children lose some portion of their body weight at the camps, few manage to keep it off after returning to the real world.

Pic by skampy.

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Whether you are heading to the beach, the park or just hanging out in the back yard, great snacks are an essential ingredient to a fun day. But spending hours in the kitchen preparing for your outing can spoil the fun before it has even begun. Simple snacks like fruit, chips and sandwiches are fine, but why not whip up something a little more special next time you are packing your picnic basket?

Cheaper than buying prepared foods from the store and quicker than you would think, The Observer has a list of 101 picnic recipes that can be put together in 20 minutes or less. Not all are kid-friendly (curried egg salad) and some sound downright strange (cold pizza and lemon), but all are unique and a lot more interesting than plain old potato salad and ham sandwiches.

I've bookmarked the page and will definitely reference it the next time we head out to the beach. What about you? Do you have your own crowd-pleasing picnic basket favorite?

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In a draft report recently issued, the Federal Drug Administration has concluded that Bisphenol A is safe --at least when used in food containers. Commonly known as BPA to consumers, the chemical can be found in all sorts of children's products as well as cars, plastic food containers and lining aluminum cans.

This most recent study was one of two funded by the industry itself. Gee, of course any study funded by the industry that stands to make money off it is going to come out with data supporting a chemical's safety. There rationale is that people are exposed to so little of it that it won't do them harm. In other studies BPA has been found in 93% of testees' urine and has been known to cause cancer and behavioral disorders in lab animals. The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) supports the findings as well.

Opponents of the decision say the study agencies don't have enough data to support their findings that BPA is safe. The country of Canada has banned the use of BPA and products containing the chemical, and national retail chain giants Wal-Mart and Toys R Us are set to remove all children's merchandise containing the chemical from their shelves as of January 2009.

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Ever have one of those nights? You really need to get out of the house, perhaps spend some time with your spouse, significant other or just yourself, but you can't get a sitter. Or, maybe you had a sitter and he/she bailed on you at the last minute. What do you do?

Many parents these days enlist a whole cadre of people to take care of their children when they want to go out. Some use parents and in-laws to get out of the house. Others enlist friends and even colleagues. Still others have nannies or daycare providers who can work evenings to cover them. Some turn to services they source online or through the yellow pages.

And some parents take their kids with them. Depending on what it is you planned on doing, you might just be able to get away with taking your kids with you. Dinner may not be as romantic, but you can generally add a high chair to your two-top. Tickets to a concert or a Broadway show are another thing all together. You certainly cannot take your child to those kinds of events, and the tickets for those kinds of things are too expensive to give up. Werll, actually, you can give those things up. Chances are you've done it, or will--and just stayed home.

What do you do when you can't find a sitter? Have you tried any of the services? If so, were they any good, and would you recommend? Or do you count on your mom and dad to cover?

It can be tough to travel when you have a family. Being away from your little ones can be as tough as the grueling red eyes, hard hotel beds and crazy meeting schedules that await you. For parents of children with special needs who find themselves business travellers as well, another layer of challenges present themselves.

In response, the parents have become quite creative in handling a hectic work schedule and managing the care of their special needs children. In a recent New York Times article, parents of special needs children discuss how they manage family and career. One child, with Prader Willi syndrome, took a trip with his travelling parent. His meals were portion-controlled and given to him every three hours. The meals were pre-made and frozen in a giant grid.

Other children require shots given with a specific technique or visits to specialists. Some parents, rather than try to cobble their family's schedule around their job, do it the other way around. Or, one parent will take on the schedule so the other parent can avoid all the appointments and have a less hectic day. Still other parents enlist the help of parents, friends and nannies. Some have even gone so far as to get help outside their regular circle by using services like sittercity.com, which helps match children with special needs with the appropriate caregiver.

The article offers some good resources for parents. Any additional thoughts or suggestions not covered by the article?

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"Mommy, what's a b job? This is a question that the mother of an eight-year-old grapples with in the new book "So Sexy, So Soon." Needless to say, when I read this, shivers went down my spine. I have an eight-year-old and though I would like to think that I wouldn't get that question for at least another seven years, it's probably an unrealistic expectation given the toxic cultural environment our kids live in.

Even the most vigilant parent cannot avoid the probability that their child will be exposed to terms and images many of us never saw or thought about until we were well into our high school years.

For one, not all parents are vigilant. Your child is bound to interact with those kids at some point. Moreover, things that were once safe, like say, the 5 o'clock news, now commonly reference once taboo subjects like oral sex (thanks a lot, Bill!) or are sponsored by products like Viagra (thanks a lot, Bob Dole!). Frankly, I think every child should have the right to enter adolescence without knowing about erectile dysfunction.

I'm a firm believer that our sexualized culture and the disturbing trend toward an accelerated adolescence are hurting girls (and boys, as my readers have reminded me) and I have blogged extensively about it. Sadly, too many kids are being robbed of their childhood and innocence by this phenomenon.

What's a parent to do? The truth is I don't know what I would have said to that eight year old. But I want to start preparing for that and other questions I know are coming sooner, rather than later. I intend to buy the book, but I also want to use this column to collect as many stories and anecdotes I can from other readers on what they did and said when their child approached them with a difficult question about sex. ParentDish is the perfect forum for this kind of exchange. I also hope readers will share what they wish they had said or done? There is so much we can learn from each other.

We may not be able to stop the cultural trends, but in the very least, we owe it to our children to try to be as informed and prepared as possible to handle their questions. If you have a personal story or comment that you think would help other readers please share it. I am TRULY looking forward to all of your comments.

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Possibly just in time for back to school, last week Republicans introduced a bill to the Senate the stop bullying in schools. The bill includes language to cover harassment of students based on sexual orientation as well as transgender students in public schools. As one gay-rghts activist noted, youth are becoing increasingly comfortable with coming out of the closet at an early age. As a result, they can suffer harassment--and worse--and need protection.

According to a representative of Senate majority leader Dean G. Skelos, the bill was in direct competition with tax relief and was not to be discussed at last Friday's special session. The bill could be given the opportunity to be introduced at another session later in the month, and most likely will as it would be unusual for a bill to be entered this time of year without the intention of getting it passed.

If it goes through, New York will be the eleventh state to introduce and adopt a bullying bill. Legislation was originally introduced in 1999 but didn't make it far as critics were uncomfortable using language regarding transgendered students, who would be protected under the current bill. The gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities have long been calling for such legislation.

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Is hiding vegetables in your kids' food wrong? What if that's the only way to get your child to eat something green (that isn't a booger)? One cookbook author strongly disagrees with the notion that it's ok to sneak healthy foods into unhealthy ones, and she's aiming to do something about it. On her blog and in her new cookbook, anyway. Tanya Steel is the author of the newly published "real food for healthy kids." She's also a "food professional." She and co-author Tracey Seaman instead focus on glorifying vegetables and trying to make them more appealing rather than sticking them in a brownie. According to Steel, who has a good point, why would we want to send the message to our children that brownies are GOOD for you, when in fact we have an obesity crisis on our hands in the United States?

Steel acknowledges that not all children are that easy to coax into eating anything green. She also demures that it can be difficult to work your way back up the beaten path of feeding your kids things that aren't as healthy because you've run out of options of what they'll actually eat. I can empathize with this problem. We recently ended a bout of our son refusing to eat ANYTHING other than Cheerios. Sure, they're healthier than pork rinds, but I didn't spend my entire pregnancy eating broccoli only to have my kid refuse to even look at a vegetable.

Steel offers suggestions to help steer kids in the right direction. She suggests offering kids "no thank you bites" to get them used to a new food and making sure to set a good example by eating healthy foods yourself. She also, of course, promotes her healthy eating cookbook. "real food for healthy kids" may not be The Joy of Cooking that Steel claims (whimsically) it is, but I'm sure there's something in that cookbook, as with any book designed with kids in mind, to offer nutritious alternatives for our children.

What do you think? Is deception the only way to get a vegetable-refuser to consume some legumes? Or is it best to just keep trying to offer different kinds of vegetables in the hopes that eventually you'll see change?

Pic by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.

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Officials in the UK have chosen to ban the word "obese" from letters being sent to parents about their children's weight. Instead the parents of these children will receive a letter saying such children are "very overweight." The move is being called both "prissy" and "namby pamby" by Tam Fry, a member of Board of the National Obesity Forum. Namby pamby? Regardless of what you call it, Fry feels a better approach is to just come clean with parents.

In the United States, we've tried to ban the word "fat" and have replaced it with the word "obese." This may or may not be having much of an impact on our nation or our youth as our waistlines continue to get bigger (while our wallets become smaller!). One person I know quite well, however, was in denial about his weight as a teenager until he saw a doctor write the word "obese" on his report during the physical he was required to get before he left for college. That person, at that exact point, took charge of his weight and his life.

As for the UK, Primary Care Trusts, or PCTs, are being guided to measure children's height and weight at ages five and eleven. Parents can choose not to participate, and so can their children. In the event that both do choose to participate, the measurements will be sent by letter to the parents and not the children. Naturally, a good portion of the obese children are not participating in the measurements, thereby negating the attempt to correct the situation. Children as little as seven years of age are being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, which was unheard of in the UK a decade ago.

What do you think? Should we go back to calling people fat? Should we call them obese? Should we only be telling their parents? Is there a good approach to any of this? I'd have to go with a quote from Aaron Neville on this one: Tell it like it is.

Pic by bethography - melting mama.

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Is it ok to set potty training deadlines? I mean for ourselves as well as our kids. Way back when it seems children were potty trained pretty quickly. Now, common wisdom holds you wait until the kid is at least three or that each child takes as long as necessary for that child to, er, get on the pot, so to speak. On the other side of the coin, though, many children must be potty trained in order to attend preschool or daycare.

But when is the right time? How do you tell when the right time is for your child? Also, with that in mind, is it ok to set goals, of any sort, for your child? I have a friend who decided she was spacing her children apart enough so that she would never have two babies in diapers at the same time. This would mean the first one would have to be toilet trained by the time the second one came along. No way of knowing whether or not that would be possible, of course, as every child is different, but it's a noble effort.

I would love it if my sixteen-month-old son were potty trained by the time he hit two years old. I don't know if this is realistic or laughable. I don't even know when a good time to get started on the training is. A colleague of mine, who is from another country, said that in her homeland the children started toilet training as soon as they were able to sit up on their own! She said she knew of kids as young as six months being potty trained! And why two years old for me as a deadline? I don't mind changing two sets of diapers, but I do mind the cost (if I go with disposables). Also, the thought of only one child in diapers at a time has its appeal. Finally, maybe what it all comes down to is that it just seems like the "right" time.

What about you? Did you set deadlines for potty training?

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Having successfully survived the trials and tribulations of toilet training four boys automatically earns me the title of "Male Potty Training Expert" among new parents. However, when anyone asks how I transitioned them from raunchy diaper-fillers to super dooper potty poopers, I truthfully say I still have NO IDEA.

The terrifying thing I learned early on about potty training is that you cannot force a kid to do it, it has to be their own decision. (If a kid figures this out too early in the game, you are SCREWED, by the way.)

Here are a few potty training tips that seemed to work in our household:

• Don't waste money on a potty chair. Instead, get a little step stool and show your little guy how to climb up on seat of the regular toilet, facing the tank to get the job done. It's much harder for little bums to accidentally fall in when positioned this way AND allows the child a better view of the jet-stream action.
• Never underestimate the excitement of being allowed to pee on a target! Throw in a few Cheerios to encourage a reluctant wee-er. (A word of caution: If you're not vigilant or clear on the rules of engagement, you might find other, less flush-able objects tossed in the commode. ASK ME HOW I KNOW!)
• There are books and DVDS about potty training that are helpful in getting the idea of toilet training across. "Everyone Poops" and "Once Upon a Potty" were well-read favorites among my boys and "It's Potty Time" video is annoying as all get out, but does have some of the best potty training lyrics EVER.
  For example:
  "He is a super dooper pooper, he can potty with the best! No more diapers to get in his way, we are really impressed!"
  "Wipe, wipe, wipe yourself always front to back! Carefully, carefully, now you have the knack!"
  "On top of your potty, you're sitting to poop. Life is so much sweeter,
  when your diapers don't droop."
  (Caution, I haven't seen this video for nearly 4 years, YET I STILL KNOW THE WORDS TO EVERY SONG.) ((Also, it contains a freaky clown and everything involving freaky clowns should come with a warning label, yet doesn't for some reason.))
• This is one of the few areas of parenthood where I found bribery to be acceptable. Actually, it's less "bribery" and "payment for poops rendered." If I'm asking the child to leave whatever they were doing to sit on the toilet rather than just going in a diaper uninterrupted, I think that's worthy of a treat. It might just be ONE M&M or mini marshmallow from in the sacred "Potty Treats" jar, but that was enough of an incentive to get them out of diapers entirely, eventually.

Do you have boy toilet training tips or tales to share?

When you're pregnant, chances are we do everything in your power to take the best care of your unborn little one as possibly. Many of us (try to) give up our bad habits and assume good ones, avoiding things and being cautious just in case. Things that seemed easy before we were pregnant get harder, and require us to pay more attention, which we generally give. And, I guess, some things we just take for granted. Like WALKING.

Yesterday I fell. Big time. I was looking in front of me rather than at the ground below and I was on my knees before I even knew I was falling. It hurt, a lot, and still does. My knees are bruised and I am pretty sure I sprained my wrist, but thankfully the rest of me is ok. Question is, how do I really know? Pregnant women, are prone to falls. Pregnant women tend to have less balance (after the fourth month) so we are cautioned to take things slower. We're also cautioned to wear flat shoes--not only because they're more comfortable than heels, but because it's easier to maintain what sense of balance we have without leverage.

That's all great advice, but what to do when you've already fallen? Well, if you have any control over the fall, make sure you avoid your belly. Also, take comfort in knowing that your womb is designed to keep your baby as safe as possible, so more likely that not, if you fall you won't have harmed your little one. Make sure everything feels "normal"--whatever that is to you--in terms of how you feel and what is going on inside there with your baby. Fetal kicks should be the same, etc. Of course check for bleeding. And, honestly, if you are even the least bit freaked out, just call the OB or go in for an appointment. Research on the web turns up little other advice other than to contact your doctor if you feel even the least bit out of sorts or in pain. Honestly, an extra trip to the doctor is well worth it, even if just for piece of mind.

Pregnancy silhouette by mahalie.

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Matt Damon is the next celebrity to invest in some good old fashioned charity work, this time by working on his children's charity. The Departed star, who recently piled on 30 pounds for The Informant, is taking the summer off to lose the weight and get the charity rolling.

The charity is to be called the One X One Foundation. Its mission is to support, improve and preserve the lives of children in Canada and around the world. According to Damon, singer Sheryl Crow is set to play at one of the Foundation's events. Earlier this year pal Ben Affleck (and daddy) recently hosted an inaugural event.

Says Damon, who is a daddy himself, making calls for the Foundation are "...easy."

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