In a similar vein to this, here are some hot new parenting tips from me:
Candlelit dinners with the kids. You say pretentious, but I say it focuses the kids on the meal and stops them from getting down off their chairs and wandering away during dinner.
Philip Glass as ‘wind down’ music before bed. You say pretentious and repetitious, but I say repetitious and it works.
Babies documentary as family movie. You say pretentious, but I say if you are going to be watching the same film over and over (I’d use the word ‘repetitious’ again but that would be, well …), which you will be doing when you have small children, then make it this one. As popular with the five-year old in our house as it is with the one year old.
While we’re talking Babies I have to say that I found Namibia pretty enchanting. Have you watched this doco? I had to keep reminding myself of things like malaria to counteract my tendency to romanticise all that footage of blissed-out mothers chatting and parenting together, and their happy little babies and children playing in the water and such.. Namibia, you’re my idea of a perfect play date.
blue milk 
I really like the idea of candle-lit dinners but I always ended up spending the whole meal saying “No, please don’t blow the candles out!” to my youngest who was positively compulsive about it. Now he at least waits till the end of the meal 🙂
I haven’t seen Babies, but I want to! I used to direct the repetitive DVD (or video as it was back when David was little) towards either David Attenborough docco’s, Wallace and Gromit, or Gilbert and Sullivan.
We like candlelit dinners too, a bit of ceremony gets them focussing on the task at hand not drifting back to what they were doing before you so rudely interrupted them with a meal.
We read the boy to sleep with adult books. We read some kid books, which he sits up and looks at and engages with, then he lies down and shuts his eyes while we read something we like. At the moment we’re on Pride & Prejudice. We’re not totally pretentious, we’ve also read and re-read The Mud House, by Richard Glover (skating over all the fart jokes and swearing because they’re counterproductive to the sleep mission), William McGuinness and Dawn French.
Our pretentious and repetitious favorite has been Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. Don’t know any Philip Glass, which is just silly, but there it is.
We saw Babies in the theater and my 4 year old was entranced. It may be the only movie he ever sat all the way through.
I do wish they’d shown a Black first-world family, though, for a little balance. And made San Francisco look a little less existentially bleak.
Actually, Koyaanisqatsi makes a pretty good toddler-entrancing repeat watch, too.
Yes on the problematic family examples in the film. There were lots of interesting conversations with the 5 yr old about different cultures and different ways of parenting versus similarities in experiences, but I also had to fight a tendency in her to generalise from the vision – “Does Namibia have no electricity?” “People in Namibia don’t wear clothes” etc etc. Had to keep saying – “some people” “these people, who live in rural areas of Namibia” etc.
And yes on San Fransisco – which is normally the kind of place I fantasize about living in and raising children in but which came across as so lifeless and false in the doco.
We grew up having the occasional candelit dinner! There are photos of my brother and I donning the fanciest frocks we could find in the dress-up box and sitting down to boiled eggs and toast by candlelight, aged about 4 and 6.
Wow that doco looks great. I’m sure my kids would be most enchanted by it.
But where did you find the Babies doco in Australia. I have looked everywhere???
I think , in a youtobe 😀