Archive for the ‘Parenting’ Category

The classic 1970s potty training book Once Upon a Potty is now an iPhone and iPad app.

This little boy catches his first fish and wants to name him Free.

From The Onion: Rich First-Grader Buys Whole Sheet of Gold Stars.

Are your tots addicted to the Cars movies? Neal Pollack speculates on their seductive power.

A study has found that kids’ asthma may actually be food allergies.

“I love you when you give me cookies.”

UCLA has what might be the first university library baby book collection.

A Tumblr account dedicated solely to proving  ’My Parents Were Awesome‘.

Share these vintage zoo posters with your little animal lover.

The Washington Post has launched a new blog: On Parenting.

Jeanne Sager sees no-hit piñatas as a symbol of all that’s wrong with the child rearing world.

Excellent litjournal Five Dials has just published an issue devoted to parenting, with Darin Strauss, Heidi Julavits, Alain de Botton, and others.

A little NSFW, but if the Today show can handle it… The new children’s book Go the F@#k to Sleep is sweeping the nation.

CBS’s newest daytime talk show “’The Talk” geared up for baby season – Rockabye Baby style.

The hosts of “The Talk” on CBS held a baby shower gift show that aired on April 28th to spur new baby gift ideas for this spring season. We all know that no baby shower is complete without a round of rock lullabies, so our Rockabye Baby gift box was a featured giveaway on the show and included Lullaby Renditions of:  U2, Journey, More Beatles, Aerosmith, Queen and of course, host Sharon Osbourne’s husband’s band, Black Sabbath.

If you would like to win a gift box that was featured on the show, please “Like” us on Facebook and then email us at giveaway[at]cmhrecords[dot]com to let us know you’d like to be entered. One lucky winner will be selected to receive the gift!

Celebrity stylist Rachel Zoe may have given birth to son Skyler just three weeks ago, but in no way is that slowing this fashion powerhouse down. In a recent newsletter, the busy new mom shares that Rockabye Baby albums start off her Top 10 Picks for the Stylish Baby. “I can already tell you, from just a few weeks in, that motherhood is the most incredible experience imaginable. Consider these gifts for your registry and you will have one happy baby!”

Zoe’s pick for newborn son, Skyler, is Rockabye Baby’s Lullaby Renditions of The Beatles! We’d say he’s off to a good musical start!

…and don’t miss more important baby instructions!

“The days of high-end restaurants shunning kids are over. Now top eateries go out of their way to offer up ‘twee-sine,’ with James Beard Award-winning chefs even hosting children’s birthday parties.”

From The Smithsonian: When did girls start wearing pink?

Is this what your childhood would look like in snapshots?

Also from Thought Catalog, “Why You Should Think Long and Hard Before Naming Your Child

More from music lovin’ car seat babies…This little boy dances in his sleep (and then that smile!).

How do babies learn to swim?

Flavorwire looks at what your favorite book then says about you now.

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For when you want to change up your scent, Play-Doh cologne (right)… and other bizarro baby products.

Economist Bryan Caplan explains why kids can be cheaper than you think.

Paste shows us how a “10-Year-Old Sings Adele Crazy Well.”

And if 10 doesn’t seem that impressive, here’s a 4-year-old conducting an orchestra.

Are baby clothes designed just a bit too girly? Alexandra Lange weighs in.

Do two daughters make the happiest family?

At Jezebel, Sarah Tuttle-Springer describes how she came to terms with circumcising her son.

A French toy giraffe (Sophie, above) that helps with teething trouble is  making it big in the U.S. Get yours here.

Thought Catalog profiles the top five overachieving babies on famous  album covers. The identity of one of the babies has only recently been  revealed.

Have an iPad at home? Check out these children’s storybook apps. The  Wall Street Journal also suggests some apps for kids.

Why do babies go so crazy for ripped paper?

Is there an ideal age to become a father?

Babble offers ten ways to build your baby’s brain power.

These eight cases of horrific and embarrassing parenting on  Facebook are classic examples of the awkward parental oversharing  discussed in this New York Post article

13 Children’s Books About Food (including Dan Yaccarino’s The Lima Bean Monster above)

Double rainbow, Golden Voice Ted Williams, Leave Britney Alone!… Kids react to viral videos.

Live in San Francisco or planning to visit? Red Tricycle is “your local playtime authority.”

Popsicle vs. Sleep! Who will emerge triumphant?

A father of triplets offers ten tips for new dads.

Expecting author Edan Lepucki reports on a collection of pregnancy and childbirth guides that are helping her go “into the experience with a positive, informed attitude.”

The GeekDad blog tackles the difficult subject of how to talk to your kids about the disasters in Japan.

Rockabye Baby and our country cousin, Hushabye Baby were recently seen on The Early Show on CBS, on a segment in which a parenting expert shared tips for soothing children with nightmares, insomnia or other sleep problems:

“Young children can be really be helped by soothing and rocking and something we found really great when my children were younger were the Rockabye and the Hushabye Baby collections. These are soft versions of rock classics. In our case we had Bob Marley and U2 and there are a lot of great music methods here that really soothe children in a different way than adults may have experienced… Parents can tolerate it, which you know a lot of children’s music – you can’t.”

Read more about helping kids go to sleep here.

An eternal debate amongst parents rages on, and once again another writer has decided to try and make sense of the boys versus girls debate. Kids are not easy to raise regardless of their gender, and of course each child is different. But let’s just put this fact aside momentarily and ponder a bit, are girls easier to deal with than boys? Are boys just a bit too crazy for a tired parent or is a girl’s (sometime) silence and sadness too confusing for a dad or mom?

In a recent article on Parenting.com Paula Spencer, discusses the differences in raising a boy or a girl and the challenges each offer parents. While she starts off the article saying that she spends much more time on her boy than on any of her three girls, this fact is pushed to the side immediately when parents of girls claim the opposite. Which is harder to raise?

Here are some tidbits from the story that can be open to debate:

  • From birth, we talk softly to girls but throw boys in the air.
  • Girls’ hearing is more sensitive in the frequency range critical to speech discrimination, and the verbal centers in their brains develop more quickly. That means a girl is likely to respond better to discipline strategies such as praise or warnings like “Don’t do that” or “Use your words.”
  • Boys tend to be more tactile — they may need to be picked up and plunked in a time-out chair
  • Boys are more rambunctious and aggressive. Taking risks lights up the pleasure centers of their brains.
  • Letting kids explore — at the cost of a few scrapes and cuts — builds character, self-confidence, resilience, and self-reliance. Boys, being natural risk takers, may need encouragement to slow down a little, but maybe girls need to be encouraged to take more risks.
  • From birth, a girl baby tends to be more interested in looking at colors and textures, like those on the human face, while a boy baby is drawn more to movement, like a whirling mobile.
  • Because girls study faces so intently, they’re better at reading nonverbal signals, such as expression and tone of voice. Boys not only learn to talk later than girls and use more limited vocabularies, they also have more trouble connecting feelings with words.
  • As girls get to be 8 or so, things can get harder: The flip side of being so adept at communicating is that girls exert a lot of energy on it. There can be a great deal of drama around who’s mad at whom, who said what and why.
  • Girls tend to grow up less confident and more insecure than boys.
  • In their early years, most boys lag behind girls in developing attentiveness, self-control, and language and fine motor skills.
  • One area where girls do less well in school concerns spatial learning, such as geometry.
  • The general consensus seems to be that boys are more of a handful early on, and girls more challenging beginning in the preteen years.

So reading these facts, what do you think? Do you agree with Spencer that boys are harder to deal with early on and easier as they get older, or is the opposite true?