8 Forgotten Kids Shows Sure to Give You Nightmares
posted on Jul 13, 2008 - View this thread

New Security Blanket, Stat! What do you do if you're a parent and your darling child's favorite toy has been worn down to nothing? Or perhaps you're thinking ahead and want a "backup binky?" You start a "Lost Lovies" thread, of course. Think of it as a hive mind for real desperate housewives looking for something better than a creative explanation as to why Sprinkles the Cow is suddenly MIA.
posted on Apr 14, 2008 - View this thread

Jack Mulqueen presents Kiddie a-Go-Go. Check out the intro brought to you by Mickelberry's Plump & Juicy Franks and their fine variety of cold cuts. Hostess Pandora (played by Jack Mulqueen's wife Elaine) introduces the Stop and Go-Go dance, followed by a live performance from the New Colony Six in full Revolutionary War costumes. Unlike the Buddy Deane Show (which inspired the movie Hairspray), this later clip indicates that Kiddie A-Go-Go had racially integrated without incident. Other happenings inspired by the Kiddie A-Go-Go include a children's album, the public access TV show Chic-A-Go-Go, and San Francisco's Pip Squeak A-Go-Go (featuring go-go dance lessons from the Devil-Ettes).
posted on Jan 15, 2008 - View this thread

Darren Karnick hands his infant to the presidential candidates and photographs the results. The Daily Telegraph says the baby primary is a clear win for Obama. The Boston Globe has more pictures of the candidates with kids. And should you be embarking on a political career, don't forget to bone up on the Commandments for Policians Who Art Babykissers, including such sound advice as "thou shouldst not drop babies thou art kissing, for surely, dropped babies will gain thee no votes."
posted on Jan 12, 2008 - View this thread

How Many Five Year Olds Could You Take in a Fight? [cached via]
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - View this thread

The antidote to the controlled, indoor world of modern kids might be Adventure Playgrounds. Messy, chaotic, but counter-intuitively, safer than traditional playgrounds, there are only two in the US: Listen to Berkeley's Adventure Playground on NPR, or check out some flickr shots. In Europe, where they originated from the rubble of WWII, and in Japan where they are also popular, the importance of play that involves risks is better understood. There are hundreds of Adventure Playgrounds outside of North America.
posted on Aug 18, 2007 - View this thread

"Give your children a program that Jesus could join. Why not step beyond a politically correct scouting program in which a Christian might not feel completely comfortable at activities, or with the materials furnished by a central committee? Are you tired of pretending to be neutral?" Keepers at Home and Contenders for the Faith are Bible-based alterntives to traditional youth scouting groups. Keepers at Home features lessons to prepare girls for their future roles as help meets, mothers, and keepers at home," while Contenders for the Faith learn "everything a Christian boy needs to learn to prepare him to be a man." Just like traditional scouting, Keepers offers uniforms, badges, and handbooks. girls. Keepers is just one of many Christian approaches to scouting; others include American Heritage Girls, Awana, and Mpact.
posted on Jul 9, 2007 - View this thread

The Blurter. The Complainer. The Know-It-All. The Spoiled Darling. You can handle them all.
posted on May 8, 2007 - View this thread

Living With a Dying Baby. "Families can choreograph their child’s very brief life with their family . . . Sometimes they may have a matter of minutes, so they decide beforehand who can hold the baby, who will cut the umbilical cord, who will hold the baby when you know he is going to die."
posted on Mar 13, 2007 - View this thread

FosterClub is an online resource for kids in foster care, providing answers, inspiration, even downloadable forms to give to caseworkers, as well as a sister site for older kids.
posted on Mar 5, 2007 - View this thread

How does your country measure up as a place to raise kids? It turns out that growing up in the UK is a bleaker experience than in any other wealthy country. UNICEF studied all the wealthiest nations (full report PDF here), and the US and UK came in at the bottom on almost all indicators (material wellbeing, health and safety, education, family and peer relationships, behaviours and risks, and the subjective feelings of kids and teens themselves ). Doing best for kids were the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. It turns out that GDP and material wealth alone does not ensure healthier or happier or more well-educated kids--the Czech Republic scored very well despite being one of the poorest nations surveyed.
posted on Feb 15, 2007 - View this thread

In 1982, ten-year old Samantha Smith from Maine wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov asking whether there was going to be a nuclear war. Andropov responded, and Samantha accepted his invitation to stay at a Russian pioneer camp with Soviet children. Tragically, within the following two years both the young Samantha and Secretary Andropov passed away. (wmv)
posted on Dec 23, 2006 - View this thread

The Toymaker offers over 40 free paper toys and pretties you can print out (PDFs) and make yourself, as well as "Stories to be Told by Firelight" - online versions of author/illustrator Marilyn Scott Waters' children's stories and lots of other fun goodies. For people who have kids, people who know kids, people who are kids, and people who love papercraft, illustration, toys, and tales. [more...]
posted on Jul 24, 2006 - View this thread

What did kids do before the Internet? Well, some bought makeup magazines, grabbed their parents' Super-8 cameras, and made their own horror movies. Now that kids have the Internet? Well, more of the same (albeit with slightly less sophisticated monsters). (YouTube, Google Video).
posted on Apr 16, 2006 - View this thread

Won't somebody please think of the children? Oh, don't fool yourselves! Americans under the age of 12 now spend or influence the spending of $565 billion a year - up from $2.2 billion in 1968, and kid-spending has roughly doubled every ten years for the past three decades, tripling in the 1990s. Which means someone is always thinking of the children. The American Association of Pediatrics (pdf) cites this bludgeoning of kidvertising as creating in children "a fever for shopping and spending, swollen expectations about material needs, decreasing immunity to the assaults of advertisers, self-concepts defined by brands of clothing, and a rash of of debt by the time they leave college". [more...]
posted on Sep 19, 2005 - View this thread

Jen's brother Liam made her son a DVD with music and videos, two of which are featured here: Arlo's Song and Picture Show. Dadalip dadalip dadalip!
posted on Apr 29, 2005 - View this thread

The Spaghetti Book Club offers book reviews by kids for kids, searchable in a variety of ways. (And most of the reviews are also illustrated by the kid-authors!). One of my favorites begins: "Do you like bad ideas or thinking about them? Well, if you like bad ideas then you should read The Book of Bad Ideas. The Book of Bad Ideas is a book that has bad ideas you really shouldn't try at home. If you try them you'll be soooorrrrryyyyy! If you want to learn more about it, I'll suggest a website but I don't know any. Maybe you should read the book."
posted on Mar 3, 2005 - View this thread

Just fill the catapult with one or more cupids, pull the trigger, and aim at the person of your dreams! This "love gun" alarms me, but maybe I overreact as a parent about my kid's exposure to violence. Is this just a harmless novelty, or a disturbing example of how desensitized we are to guns? At least it's for kids over 3.
posted on Feb 4, 2005 - View this thread

Playground Finder is a community service created by Ben and Suzette Hosken. The parents of two young children, they saw a need for a service providing details of playgrounds within their local area as well as when travelling. This idea grew into Playground Finder. [found while eyeballing loobylu]
posted on Feb 1, 2005 - View this thread

Hello to you, my name is Liquor Control Bee (wav). Meet L.C. Bee -- his songs are sure to keep your kids uncrunked. Part of an elite cabal of juvenile moralizers, L.C. Bee is currently collaborating on an album with Daren the D.A.R.E lion (WAV). These kids today, you know.
posted on Jan 29, 2005 - View this thread

Smoosh! • "Two Seattle sisters, Chloe (age 9) on drums and vocals and Asya (age 11) on keys and vocals, write and play pensive, pulsing indie pop rock." Audio interviews & live songs available from KEXP radio. Certainly more endearing than these little tykes.
posted on Dec 24, 2004 - View this thread

A tour with WotC, a session to play D&D with them. Lifetime subscription to Steam. Ok, some items are better than others. But for Child's Play, the folks at PA are pulling one heckuva dream auction for geeks. More auction items are detailed, go to the the second news post.
posted on Nov 18, 2004 - View this thread

Çatalhöyük , a site for kids devoted to the archeological excavations of the remains of a Neolithic town in central Turkey. A great introduction for all ages to this important city, with activities, quicktime tours and links to more in depth resources.
posted on Oct 19, 2004 - View this thread

NSFW: Childhood misconceptions about sex. Both the male and female (linked as this post's title). I found them quite amusing. In a similar vein, we also have I Used to Believe, which I think has been MeFied previously.
posted on Sep 1, 2004 - View this thread

Under eights give their opinions on classic rock - Bob Dylan (and others) get compared to Busted.
posted on Jan 31, 2004 - View this thread

superhandz is billed as an an x-treme hand sportz site. But impressive as some of these displays are, when it comes to flourish, can anyone even begin to compete with three-year old Mo Kin?(quicktime clip)
posted on Oct 25, 2003 - View this thread

Modern day children-- they don't make 'em like they used to-- review classic gaming. Hilarity ensues.
posted on Oct 16, 2003 - View this thread

kids.us ready to go. Hidden amongst the seemingly endless barrage of SOBig virii this morning was an interesting email from that ResourceShelf Guy on the new kids Domain.
Being billed as "an Internet domain that parents and children can trust for educational and appropriate online fun" kids.us Launches On September 4, 2003. You can read the Overview of kids.us Policies and Procedures, or Register A Name (starting next week).
Interestingly they Say a company called cyveillance will be "monitoring and reviewing" content for the domains.
The domain names will Look a little funny, but maybe Someone should snag www.metafilter.kids.us, you know, for the kids. They don't seem cheap, as "Registrants will be charged a combined registration fee and a non-refundable application fee for five-year registration.
posted on Aug 28, 2003 - View this thread

Grinding Nemo. The JWC company, maker of sewage equipment, wishes to issue a press release informing small children everywhere that contrary to scenes in the hit Disney movie, flushing fish down a toilet drain will not set them free in the ocean, but rather melt them with chlorine disinfectant before shredding them into particles with processing machinery. Have a great weekend.
posted on Jun 6, 2003 - View this thread

San Francisco Symphony's Kid Site. Parents, if you have not seen this, check it out. Are there any other sites that do a good job introducing music to kids?
posted on Apr 1, 2003 - View this thread

bzzzpeek - a fun site with kids from around the world imitating animals and vehicles in an exercise of onomatopoeia. Similar to a post last year, this version adds sounds from native speakers and some cute visuals, making for a neat toy. MeFi moms & dads take note - submissions from kids age 2 to 7 are invited. flash and sound alert!
posted on Feb 9, 2003 - View this thread

Playground law - a comprehensive (warning: pun) list of school yard insults. Beware - it sucks you in, I've been reading for an hour and I'm only on 'c'.
posted on Jan 16, 2003 - View this thread

KidPub is an enchanting little website that I rediscovered after rediscovering a list of my circa-1995 bookmarks. (And it looks today almost exactly like it did then -- you can even see a bit of Siegel influence) KidPub is a place for children to post their stories, poems, etc. Most of the authors seem to be in the 9- to 12-year-old age range, and the stories have titles like "The Mystery of the Circus Clown" and "Crazy School". A cute site to remind you of the importance of reading and writing for children.
posted on Nov 11, 2002 - View this thread

Is this naturism, photography or soft-core child pornography? If you search for photographers like Sally Mann or Jock Sturges you'll come across this entirely legitimate purveyor of naturist books and videos. In the Fifties and Sixties nudist magazines, like Health and Efficiency, were an excuse for looking at naked bodies. Now that porn is legal, have nudist publications made a comeback as an excuse for looking at photographs of naked children? Their website is itself well concealed - the front page looks innocent enough but, the further you click into it, the more unsettling it becomes. Or are we all becoming to paranoid for our own good? (I'd say NSFW)
posted on Nov 9, 2002 - View this thread

Teens, sex, and power of parents How did you "discover" sex? from mom? school? Or the pals down the block?
posted on Sep 5, 2002 - View this thread

CIA's Home Page for Kids "Fly high on intelligence, NOT drugs..."
posted on May 14, 2002 - View this thread

Chicken or Egg? Well .... neither, apparently.

"One little chap thought that you got orange juice from milk, because the milkman delivered orange juice to his door ".

Anyone else have amusingly misguided, yet (slightly) logical assumptions as a kid?.

posted on May 2, 2002 - View this thread

Missing school bus found near D.C. Berks Academy administrator Robert Becker said: "I am totally relieved and thankful to the Lord for protecting these kids." Um, excuse me?
posted on Jan 24, 2002 - View this thread

Strategery for Kids! Just like the real white house website, except done in fingerpaint. Come learn about Ofelia, who loves great american authors almost as much as she loves daydreaming. Beware of the cat, 'cause she's got a mean line of questions waiting for you. There's also some well-developed questions and answers with W, Cheney is shown exercising, and hey! put a coaster under those things!
posted on Aug 31, 2001 - View this thread

What does every kid want? What does every kid need? Kidz Bop! But what does everyone need to do? Watch the infomercial.
posted on Jul 15, 2001 - View this thread

FEMA for kids! Let Herman the spokescrab guide you through the catalog of potentially civilization ending disasters. Education is great. Entertaining your kids on cabin fevered summer days is better. I have friends that when they bring their young buck over send him to my computer to play the kiddie offerings at nick.com (sorry dead link this time o' night it seems). But I can just hear the sunburned Minnesota five year old who's been overly femafied asking mommy after her bedtime story, "August is hurricane season. Is it windy now because we're going to have a hurricane?" Mom strokes child's hair, "No, here we're only prone to devastating thunderstorms, tornadoes, floods, kidcicle causing cold and blizzards. Now you have sweet dreams and quit worrying about ridiculous things like that. 'Night." Like of course, a kid that age would really find the FEMA website riveting to begin with. . .
posted on Jul 1, 2001 - View this thread

Tiki Trouble My kids have been logging major time with this lately, so I thought I'd share it. For our collector of Tikiana. (Flash)
posted on Mar 20, 2001 - View this thread

Pennsylvania School cut father's opportunity to lunch with his son after he has been there every day for four years. Due to his work schedule this is the only time he has to spend with his son.
posted on Feb 2, 2001 - View this thread

Extremely important question: Should 5-year-old kids be allowed to bungee jump?
posted on Nov 18, 2000 - View this thread

PoPoRon is "kind of like a pyschedelic photoshop for kids. but even better than that, really." link via Mister Pants and thewebtoday
posted on Nov 15, 2000 - View this thread

Disney.com launches Surf Swell Island: Adventures in Internet Safety
What is Goofy doing on The Cliffs of Mean Manners? Will Donald get lost in The Virus Caves? Is Minnie safe on No Privacy Beach?
posted on Aug 9, 2000 - View this thread

teens spin web of the future. great article re: the winners of a competition for teenagers maintaining useful, unique, nonprofit sites.

Emily Boyde, 17, of Newcastle, Australia, was the only female finalist. Her Web site, MatMice, allows kids to create their own Web sites and view sites made by their friends.

She taught herself to write HTML, the language used to create Web sites. "I don't know a lot of other females who do this sort of thing," she said. "But after I saw the Internet, I liked the look of it. So I decided to learn to use it myself."

Emily rocks my world.
What do you think of the winners?
posted on Jun 25, 2000 - View this thread

The original programmer of the Broderbund/Mattel "spyware" explains that it's actually NOT spyware. This topic was originally discussed on MeFi in this thread.
posted on Jun 17, 2000 - View this thread

Kids aren't particularly gullible. Though I must admit, I like the slug Neale put on this story better...
posted on Jun 12, 2000 - View this thread

A new child privacy law is in effect , what do you think?
posted on Apr 21, 2000 - View this thread

Is it time to be scared of seven year olds now? Muderous plot? From children? Sounds like a reporter using strong words for some playground craziness, and everyone overreacting. Reminds me of a certain show I saw last night...
posted on Apr 13, 2000 - View this thread