While I don’t have specific artist recommendations, I would totally steer Janelle towards Greasy Kid Stuff on WFMU. The actual program itself is on temporary hiatus at the moment, but Janelle can check out the archives for hip kid-appropriate artists and albums. The hosts, Belinda and Hova, fall under the demographic of hip parents themselves, and the entire program is usually very listenable for adults.

G

Dear What’s Up G,

Aw, FMU.Always a solid choice.

More kid-friendly listening is below; if I got a suggestion more than once, it’s asterisked.

Trout Fishing In America, “Big Trouble”*
The Jack Johnson soundtrack to Curious George*
The Beatles, “One”*
Sandra Boynton’s CD/book sets: “Dog Train,” “Rhinoceros Tap,” “Philadelphia Chickens”*
They Might Be Giants, “No!” and “Here Come The ABCs”*
Dan Zanes*
The New Pornographers
Barry Louis Polisar, “Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls”*
“A Treasure in My Garden”
Laurie Berkner*
James Brown
Cake
Jerry Garcia and David Grisman, “Not For Kids Only”*
“For the Kids” and “For the Kids Too”*
“In Harmony — A Sesame Street Record”
Putumayo Kids*
The Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack
Beastie Boys
Robbie Schaefer, “Songs for Kids Like Us”
Big Smith, “From Hay to Zzzzzz: Hillbilly Songs for Kids”
The Beach Boys*
Elvis
“Free To Be You and Me”
Baby Rock Records*
Soundtracks to kids’ movies, like Shrek or The Little Mermaid*
“Disney’s Greatest Hits”*
Peter, Paul & Mary, “Peter, Paul & Mommy”
Brave Combo, “All Wound Up”
Sara Hickman*
Taj Mahal’s kids’ album
John Lithgow*
Ella Jenkins
Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s “Gift of the Tortoise”*
Ralph’s World*
Uncle Rock, “Plays Well With Others”
Justin Roberts*
All Girl Summer Fun Band
The Be Good Tanyas
Apples In Stereo
Dressy Bessy
That Dog
“The Bottle Let Me Down”*
Nippaz With Attitude
“Veggie Rocks!”*
Nerissa and Katryna Nields, “All Together Singing in the Kitchen”
The Innocence Mission, “Now The Day Is Over”*
Joel Frankel
Jim Gill
“Simply Mad About the Mouse”
The Ramones*
Carole King, “Really Rosie”*
The soundtrack from The Backyardigans*
Tom Chapin*
John McCutcheon*
Sarah Pirtle
Cathy Fink and Marci Marxner
Pete Seeger*
Willie Nelson, “Rainbow Connection”*
Dr. Demento
Milkshake*
Great Big Sea
Moxy Fruvous
“Bedtime with the Beatles”
Bruce Molsky
Buckwheat Zydeco, “Choo Choo Bugaloo”
Chenille Sisters
“Mary Had a Little Amp”*
The Muppets*
Steve Burns, post-Blue’s Clues
“For Our Children: 10th Anniversary Edition”*
Jonathan Coulton
Harry Connick Jr., “Songs I’ve Heard”*
The Rheostatics, “The Story of Harmelodia”
Red Grammer
Jim Copp
“Mother Goose Rocks”
Cribrock
“Music For Little People”*
The Dirty Sock Funtime Band
“See You On The Moon”*
Nancy White
Charlotte Diamond
School House Rock*
Gilbert and Sullivan
Duplex, “Ablum”
Paul Simon, “Graceland”
Christine Lavin
John Flynn*
“Baby Loves Jazz”
The Lion King (the musical, not the movie)
“The Johnny Cash Children’s Album”
“Animaniacs: Yakko’s World”
Erin Lee & Marci
“‘Til Their Eyes Shine: The Lullaby Album”
“Songs for Wiggleworms”
“Rockabye Baby — Lullaby Renditions of Radiohead”*
Asylum Street Spankers, “Mommy Says No!”
Banana Slug String Band
Lilo & Stitch, “Island Favorites”

Also try:
Checking iTunes for kid-friendly mixes from other users
www.bestchildrensmusic.com
Search Scalzi’s blog for mixes he’s made for his daughter: www.scalzi.com/whatever
The Spare The Rock, Spoil The Child podcast at sparetherock.com
wizardrock.org
Recommendations from the Times of London
“The Poop” from the SF Gate
The children’s music show on WERS
“Kindie rock” on Salon.com
(Sm)allages.com
WXPN‘s Kids’ Corner

Dear Sars,

I love your advice, and particularly the logic you use. I could use some of your logic now.

My mother and both my in-laws are type 2 diabetics, and my husband was just diagnosed as insulin resistant (precursor to diabetes). So I made some changed to the household pantry. Husband always had a sweet tooth, and so does our seven-year-old daughter. But I banned sugar from the house and instead concentrated on making really delicious things that are also healthy, like sugar-free fruit muffins, pies, cakes, frozen yogurt…and I’m a pretty good cook and have become the centre of extended family life because of it.

I similarly revamped my daughter’s school lunches. No more junk. Instead, exotic fruits and aforesaid muffins…but also yummy savoury things such as dips, different breads, pasta salads with chicken, tuna, or teriyaki beef, spicy vegetable and chick-pea patties, Vietnamese rice-paper rolls with mint and chicken…you get the picture.

She loves it and after an initial period of being grumpy about no sweets (as I am worried about her genetic propensity to diabetes), she got out of the sweet habit and basks in the glory as her friends raid her lunch box at school (I always give her extra now because of this).

I am not fundamentalist about it. She can eat what she likes at birthday parties, and at the occasional sleepover at a friend’s on the weekend, but during the week, no sugar, because she is my responsibility and part of that responsibility is not feeding her stuff that will make her diabetic later on and getting her into good habits now.

But…she has a friend at school, K. K is a sweetheart, but her mother, less so. I never liked the mother much, but never had a lot to do with her. A little while after I removed sweets from week days, I started to notice the occasional chocolate wrapper (full-size chocolate, BTW) in my girl’s lunch box. I asked her where she got them and she told me from K. After a couple of months of this, it came out that K’s mother was packing full-size chocolates for both K and my daughter EVERY DAY. By the way, K is overweight, and has lunches of junk a lot.

I had a very polite word with the mother, and explained about the diabetes and family history. K’s mother asked if my daghter was diabetic, and I said no and K’s mother implied I was being overly zealous. I said I understood (lie) but could she please humour me anyway. She rolled her eyes and said something about feeling sorry for my daughter, but whatever, she’d comply. I also spoke to my daughter and told her that just because she was offered, didn’t mean that she had to accept the chocolate.

But the girl is only 7, and not a very good liar, and after some time, I noticed the chocolate wrappers return.

I spoke again to the mother and was again polite, but the mother acted like a real horror. She said that she could give her daughter anything she liked, and that if my daughter ate from her daughter’s lunchbox, that was my problem, but after extensive discussion with my daughter, I know that K’s mother tells K SPECIFICALLY to give these chocolates to my girl. God only knows why.

Anyway, the idiot mother said to me that if I continued to make trouble, she would prevent K from seeing my girl. And my girl loves K, who, like I said, is a sweetheart. I don’t want that.

Sars, I am beside myself and don’t know what to do. This woman is crazy, and my daughter is a potential glutton, with a dangerous likelihood of diabetes. My husband wants to talk to the school, but I am scared of the fallout for my girl. I don’t want her to lose a friend through no fault of her, or her friend’s, own.

What should I do?

Ila

Dear Ila,

Forbid your daughter to eat the chocolate.Period.You’re the parent; she’s the child.What you say goes.Tell her she’s not to accept the candy.

I don’t know why K’s mother is so insistent on feeding your daughter candy, but K’s mother doesn’t have the power to ground your kid if she’s busted eating sweets you didn’t expressly permit — you do.If you feel that strongly about it, order your daughter not to eat the candy and tell her she’s punished if you find out she’s disobeying you.

Is that going to work?Maybe, maybe not.Kids do shit they aren’t supposed to all the time, and K is right there at lunchtime, urging the chocolate on your daughter; you aren’t, so you can enlist the school administration to watch your daughter eating to make sure she’s not eating the chocolate, or you can trust your daughter to do as she’s told, and let it go.

I’d let it go.You can’t get K’s mother to stop sending the chocolate to school, so you have two other choices: take a hard line, which is going to be a pain to maintain and is also going to seem hypocritical to your daughter, a little bit, when you let her eat candy elsewhere; or tell her that you don’t want her eating the candy and that you expect her to refuse it, and drop it.I know this is an irritant, but your daughter doesn’t have diabetes yet, you see to it that she eats healthily most of the time, and I don’t think you really want to micro-manage her diet when she’s out of your sight to quite this degree when it’s not necessary yet.

Sars:

I’m a 27-year-old professional with a university degree. I unadvisedly
got married when I was 19, to a man that I loved deeply at the
time. I am Canadian, he was American, and it seemed like the only
option for us to be together. While this man had a lot of potential,
he never grew up or developed. During his perpetual unemployed
youth, I went to (and paid for) university, moved and worked in other
cities/countries, changed careers, went into therapy et cetera. Finally last
year, in October, after seven years of a really terrible marriage, I
kicked him out. We haven’t spoken in months, and this is a good thing
for me. I learned a lot about myself, and how I deal with people.

I used to be a real “party girl,” in that I would binge-drink and use
drugs on the weekend. Then sometimes during the week. If I was on
holidays or unemployed, it was every day (or every other day as soon
as I had recovered). This period of a few years was due to the tragic
loss of a classical music career due to an injury. I bottomed out, but
saw that life had better things in store for me, so I clawed my way
back up to the light, and I’m doing pretty well now. I have a good job
with a good future, I have a nice apartment (that I can pay the rent
on), and I even have food in the fridge. These are things I didn’t
always have.

The wrench in this whole thing is (guess what!) a relationship. About
four years ago, my husband-at-the-time (I’ll call him Henry) and I met
another couple, and really hit it off with them. I’ll call them Drew
and Ella. The four of us would hang out all the time. Drew and I liked
to party on the weekends, but Henry and Ella really disliked it. Drew
and I bonded as friends, but nothing untoward ever happened between
us, as we are both loyal partners. No hanky-panky, just fun times.

Fast forward a few years, and Drew has broken up with Ella, and Henry
and I have split up. Drew and I did the “friends with benefits” thing
for a while, before we realized that we were in love, and became a
couple. Because we were friends for so long, we moved quite quickly,
and it would seem like we had been together for much longer.

The problem lies in that Drew is still a partier, and by partier, I
mean “alcoholic.” This isn’t news to me, and there have been times in
my life when someone might look at me and think I was an alcoholic.
I’m not, but I can and do turn to liquor for good times or to forget.
I have been in therapy for years, and my drug and alcohol use is
VASTLY reduced, to the point where it is no more than many average
twentysomethings living in a big city.

Drew’s alcoholic behaviour is really starting to grate on my nerves,
though. While he is never violent, he’s boring and obnoxious and
generally very unlikeable. Our relationship is very solid, and there
are many good things, but I am giving very serious consideration to
asking him to move out.

The reason I haven’t done this yet is that if I look at Drew’s
behaviour over the past four, three, two years…even over the past six months,
he’s made huge changes and big efforts to improve his habits. In fact,
he’s kicked a pretty serious drug habit (cocaine), and reduced his
alcohol consumption by over 125 percent (by volume). Should I wait a bit
longer, and see how this turns out? I think this might be THE
relationship. We understand each other on so many levels.I would
like to have kids in about five, six years, and I think he could be a
fantastic father, but I would never bring a child into my family with
a father that drinks.

I am a demanding, high-achieving person. Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m
just giving him a really hard time, or if my instincts are correct. In
the past, my instincts were really messed up. I also feel like a
hypocrite. My ex-husband gave me the space I needed to figure out my
substance abuse issues, and I learned a lot because I had that space.
Now that the tables are turned, I feel completely unwilling to be
patient and understanding.

And just to be clear, Drew drinks every day. He holds down a job with
no problem, and if we are visiting my parents/grandparents/et cetera he has
no problem not drinking. However, if we are at home, he’s drinking.
Usually I’m drinking too, but I drink slowly and generally remain
sober, or close to it. The next day, I’m left explaining what happened
the night before, because he often blacks out. It’s not a pretty
picture, but I do love this man, and I know what he’s going through.

Am I nuts? Should I just get out now? Maybe now isn’t the time for
this relationship, but somewhere down the road when he’s grown up a
bit. I don’t know.

Lost in the haze

Dear Lost,

It’s not Drew who needs to grow up here.I mean, he does, and really, it’s not so much “growing up” you need to do as “growing” period, because Drew and your ex-husband are part of the same pattern — guys who don’t have their shit together in various ways, who by extension let you feel better about yourself because at least you [insert thing you do that they can’t] here.You have a job, you control your drinking, whatever.

I’m not convinced that you do control your drinking — I’m getting a lot of rationalizing from this letter that suggests to me that you need booze more than you’d like to admit, and like I said, I feel like part of the attraction of Drew is that he’s worse off than you, which lets you kind of not address ongoing issues in that regard.Whatever the case, Drew is not going to change for you; if you want him to get his drinking under control, tell him so, and if he doesn’t do it, leave — not to punish him, but because you have better things to do than drown in the undertow of another guy’s haplessness.

Read this letter again.Listen to yourself.You’re still not dealing with something — the injury, your marriage, I don’t know exactly what, but you’re bargaining with me about how much you both drink and trying to make it out like everything’s peachy except for this one little problem.And I’m not buying it.You’re not happy.Drew is an alcoholic; his primary relationship is with his addiction, not with you.You need to continue counseling and strongly consider breaking it off with him — to figure out who you are and what you want, without any distractions.Think about what’s really going on here, with you.This isn’t about Drew, in the end.

[10/3/06]

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