After a long, lazy summer, your kids are heading back to school this week. Is it safe to say they’re not entirely happy about this? Two Meredith magazines — Parents and Family Fun — promise to make the ordeal a bit easier. But both manage to airbrush the difficulties with an obsessive focus on how to con kids into eating healthy foods or keep them occupied with craft projects.
Family Fun mostly caters to parents of well-behaved girls, with its focus on arts and crafts and cooking for beginners. There’s a feature article called “Sew Cool for School,” in which kids learn how to decorate desk organizers, backpacks and pencil pouches with needlepoint. Sound like more fun than playing Candy Crush on an iPhone? If your kid thinks so, maybe you should be writing a magazine column yourself.
Other pearls of wisdom include recipes that overthink snacks like trail mix. Take the “banana split” version, which has kids grabbing fistfuls of popcorn, banana chips, chocolate chips, walnuts and freeze-dried strawberries. Blech! For the kids with sophisticated palates, it suggests a sushi-stuffed avocado. We wonder how that recipe plays in Meredith’s home state of Iowa.
Parents teases us with a cover photo of fashion designer Rebecca Minkoff, posing with her two kids, Luca, 5, and Bowie, 3. If you’re hoping for a celebrity dish on parenting, the closest thing to dirt you’ll find in this fluffy one-page Q&A is Minkoff admitting that she shops at Zara for her kids.
Parents’ take on back-to-school includes 50 tips from teachers, educational experts, bus drivers and the like. It goes without saying that a number of them strike us as not so bright. But the hands-down jaw-dropper of them all was tip No. 9, from a first-grade teacher in North Carolina who advises — we kid you not — “Ask me for my Starbucks order, and surprise me with it one morning.” We’re guessing (and hoping) this teacher — and her principal — got a few eye-openers from parents who read that one. Ditto for the editor of this particular feature.
Elsewhere, Parents tackles tough issues: finding time for sex (the parents, we mean) and an article on how parents balance work and financial stresses these days.
Hint: If you were hoping for a way around it, you’d better get a grip: Expect to fork over as much as 30 percent of your income on child care.
Disciplining kids a big business
Look out, Park Slope: New York has a feature on how creepy — and expensive — helicopter parenting can be.
Kim Brooks writes about parents so defeated by their rowdy kids that they’ve turned to a company called Cognition Builders to turn their homes into a real-life “Truman Show,” with hidden cameras and an army of “family architects” tracking Skip and Muffy’s movements.
After reviewing weeks of video and live footage, the architects concoct a disciplinary plan for parents to follow when the monsters stray.
But after receiving a $70,000 bill from the company for five weeks of work, one parent joked that she worried more about what Cognition Builders put on her credit card than what her son did. (The brat had once racked up $10,000 in charges after having his video-game budget slashed.)
“As the company sees it, parents are often too focused on the child and the child’s behavior to see the bigger picture,” Brooks writes.
Meanwhile, the New Yorker also discusses climate change in the wake of Harvey, blasting President Trump and members of Congress.
“As misguided as the Bush Administration was about climate change, Donald Trump has taken willful ignorance to a whole new level,” Elizabeth Kolbert writes.
Elsewhere, the mag revisits former NYPD officer Bobby Hadid — dubbed the “love cop” by The Post. Hadid lost his job on the squad in 2011 after it emerged that he lied under oath about contact he had with a female homicide suspect. Hadid’s 2012 perjury conviction was overturned two years later.
He is now working as a taxi driver after failing to find another job with the city. Hadid, who is Muslim, sued the city in 2015 in an effort to get reinstated, arguing then — as he did with the New Yorker — that he was targeted for raising concerns about how the NYPD targeted Muslims.
