Head Tale

The controversial traveling show “Our Bodies” is at Regina's Science Centre right now and they're offering a lecture series each week to go with the topic.  This week's subject was “Kids As Couch Potatoes” and that seemed fairly relevant to our lives these days so we decided to go check it out.

Some random thoughts on both…
– I'm not sure what I expected but the exhibit didn't blow me away.  I even wondered if we were getting the full show or if we got a bit of a mini-version being a smaller centre.  (My memory of hearing about it when it played Toronto while in library school was that tickets were like $50 or $75 or something.  Here, I think it's $20 and we got a discount for coming on lecture night.)

– the lecture revealed that kid watching TV is…bad!  (Who'd a thunk it?)  But still an informative talk with lots of good information and statistics (now where do those come from?) 

– also lots of information about our society's less-than-active lifestyles – kids *and* parents – which are obviously closely linked.

– Shea and I both know we let Pace watch too much TV (and here I'll sound like that smart but not too smart friend from a recent blog post who happily used a sample size of one to show that formula feeding ain't that bad) but I watched a lot of TV growing up and I feel like I turned out okay.  In fact, you rarely hear people (outside of the TV industry I guess) citing some of the benefits of watching television – it gives you cultural literacy and I'd argue a better awareness of our commonality than perhaps any other medium, it gives you visual literacy, it helps you in social situations, it can help you win money on TV game shows (okay, now I'm stretching and my arguments are collapsing in on themselves too!)

– speaking of breastfeeding, again that idea that extended breastfeeding doesn't get the promotion it deserves is all over the place when you're looking for it.  The lecturer pointed out that UNICEF recommends six months of breastfeeding and I felt Shea tense, knowing she wanted to scream out “two years!”  (They're both right – UNICEF recommends six months of *exclusive* breastfeeding but for that to be sustained for two years.  But the point – why wouldn't a PhD in children's health studies take this opportunity to promote breastfeeding for the longer length of time in a crowd with lots of parents and families present?)

– Then, in the “fetal” part of the exhibit (not as bad as it sounds but they had it curtained off with an additional warning notice), they had one sign talking about SIDS which listed some of the contributing factors – pre-mature birth, drug & alcohol dependency in the mother, etc.  But of course no mention that not being breastfed is now considered just as much of a potential cause of SIDS as those other things.

– Lots of the controversy around the exhibit is about the exhibition of human bodies for what is, in essence, entertainment (edutainment?)  There is also some concern from the religious angle which, as an atheist, I can nicely ignore.  Much more worrisome is the uncertainty about how the bodies were obtained and what sort of consents (if any) were in place.  I mean, I've got my signed organ donor card in my wallet.  But no similar document can or has been produced for these specimens who are suspected to possibly be executed Chinese criminals or worse (body trafficking?)

– our regular babysitter got her license recently and that's probably a clue that we'll be looking for a new babysitter soon.  She's already gotten a job at a local bakery but says she'll still do some babysitting…at least for the time being.  Man, where did the last couple years go?