Not telling them made sense at the time. We were a Waldorf School family. All that terrible day at my kids’ Pennsylvania school there was intense whispering in the halls — teachers and parents trying to make sense of a world suddenly falling apart. Figuring out What To Tell The Children.

In the end, school officials opted to ask us parents to tell our kids nothing. This was a burden adults should bear alone, they said. So I went home with my children and tried not to watch the horrible images on CNN. Turned off NPR. Refrained from hugging my kids too tightly. Kept adult whispering to secluded late nights and early mornings. Tried not to think of the families who had suddenly lost someone. Tried not to wonder if the world was going to end.

It made sense at the time. My older son was just six. Too little, I thought, to know the fear and anger that suddenly gripped a nation. Too little to think about lives cut short. Too little to worry about whether Daddy — an airline pilot — would be coming home every time he left the house to fly.

But then years went by. Things changed after 9/11. We didn’t go on as many trips that involved airplanes. When we did fly, we had to stand in long security lines and take our shoes off. The air everywhere was tenser. Tighter. Kids notice this stuff.

I finally told my son about 9/11 when he was probably 9 or 10. I don’t remember it. I can’t imagine what I said: “Hey Nathaniel, remember those really tall buildings that used to be in New York? Well, they fell down one day. Most of the people died. It was horrible. There was badness in the world. Everything changed after that.” It was really strange to me, knowing for years that this horrible thing had happened in the world and that my kid — a thinking, feeling, aware being — didn’t know anything about it.

When I was a teenager my parents had some financial issues. There was a second and then a third mortgage on the house. In my first semester of college, my parents decided to divorce and suddenly I had to scramble to find financial aid. If I had been clued in even a little about the depth of the family’s financial situation, I could have helped. Contributed. Made plans. But I never knew until it was too late.

I think it is good to protect our kids from the really bad things that happen. In my opinion, way too many kids watch way too much violence on TV and movies. But there are other bad things that affect us as humans. Kids are our future. I believe they should know — at a level that fits what they can understand — about things that happen that change the world or their families. Every family has a different standard about what to tell the kids about bad news, but I believe most kids are stronger and more capable than we give them credit.

It’s time to be honest with our children. It’s time to tell them the bad news too.

Sometimes I suck at telling my truth. It’s not that I want to lie intentionally — I hate lying. I remember the first time as a kid I ever told a lie. I was about 8 and took a dollar from my mom’s purse and never told her. OMG, stealing AND lying. Bad, bad. For days I lay awake at night, cowering in my bed because I thought the Hand of Zeus would come down from the clouds and smite me while I slept. I remember being surprised when it didn’t. Lying still gives me that feeling, at least Capital-L Lying does. Smiting. **shiver**

There are other kinds of lying.

Here’s my other kind: I withhold my truth. One way is I keep it in. It’s not intentional, not really. But for protection? You betcha. Sometimes I think people will get angry with me if I say my truth. It’s happened before, all my life really. I learned long ago to hold stuff in, and not say it, so I wouldn’t get hurt. Do you do that? Another way I withhold my truth is from wanting to protect people from it. I think it might hurt them. So maybe I think in the privacy of my mind that my neighbor is a fat cow. Maybe she really is a fat cow. I see the milk truck drive up. I hear mooing at night. My neighbor is really a Far Side cow disguised as a person. But would I ever say it? To her sweet bovine face? Not unless we were super close friends and she asked me to. Otherwise, well, I could hurt her AND she could get angry. That’s a lose lose.

Problem is, that kind of lying — the withholding kind — sucks too.

My kid Serena is pretty awesome. We chat via IM nearly every day. Mostly we talk about our respective writing projects (she’s about to become a published poet, yay), but sometimes she brings serious stuff to me. Even though I am 3000 miles away, I am still the parent she asks advice from.

Last week it was a friend issue. There was a girl that she and a third friend wanted to distance from. Turns out the girl was scary. Had a scary dad. My kid and the third friend had a scary mall experience with Scary Girl and her scary dad, and ended up calling Third Friend’s parent to take them home and away from the scariness. Yay for my kid for having the presence of mind to take care of herself and get out of a scary situation.

Now Serena wants help. She wants to get as far as possible from Scary Girl. What do I tell Scary Girl to get her to go away? Serena asked me. We don’t want her sitting with us. She’s scary and she talks too much. She’s annoying.

I posed a series of questions to get at the gist of the problem. What was annoying about her? What do you mean, scary? Scary how? What are you afraid of, exactly?

Turns out Serena was afraid of confrontation.

Welcome to the real world, Serena. I am sorry you had to see this. Most of us avoid confrontation (waving hand high in the air). But avoiding confrontation keeps us from telling our truth. It keeps us from being in integrity with who we are inside. Serena, I want better for you. I am your mother and I love you. I want you to be a woman who stands up for herself. Who tells her truth when she needs to. Who holds her integrity high.

So I told Serena to tell Scary Girl her truth. You scared me. Your dad scared me. You talk too much at the lunch table and I never get to talk to Third Friend. I don’t want to eat lunch with you anymore. I am too scared to be friends with you.

I haven’t yet heard how Serena’s Truth Talk went.

What do you tell your kids to do in a sticky situation like this when feelings could be hurt or there could be confrontation?

But you know what? She needed it. And I decided to step up as her mother. No one else in her life is teaching her how to be around people, so it was clear to me that even from 3000 miles away I can have a super-positive impact on the adult my kid turns out to be. And manners make life better. No, wait. GOOD manners make life better.

I wish someone had taught me what I am trying to teach my kid. I had to learn it myself. The hard way.

For me, going to kindergarten was like visiting a foreign country. Every day. Without a guidebook. Everyone else was busy hammering nails into pieces of wood, playing house, and coloring inside the lines. Then there was me. Who had to painfully learn everything that the other kids knew instinctively. Things like being okay raising your hand to go to the bathroom. Or like putting your head down on your desk after consuming the little carton of fruit punch that came around every day on a cart. Or like lining up at the door of the classroom to go in after recess. Or like knowing that in the calendar the week begins with Sunday. That one still doesn’t make sense to me).

And later as an adult I had to learn about small talk. How weird! I thought only adults talked about weather! But no!

I could have saved myself a lot of grief and social awkwardness if only someone had talked to me about how to be with other people. How to show kindness. How to be polite but strong (as opposed to politeness from fear of people, which I was pretty good at). How to lube the social wheels. How to act when things are out of the ordinary.

So far I’ve run across a ton of people who I suspect could also use this knowledge. The snarky line jumper at the Denver Science Center. People who don’t leave a clean stall in public restrooms. Anyone with a full cart in a 10 Items Or Less lane.

But I can’t change all those people. I can’t teach them what their parents failed to do. But I can help my own kids become awesome adults. I wrote all this in a note attached to the book, because, really, who wants a book on manners for their birthday? So besides the family heirloom charm bracelet I passed down to her this year, my daughter also received a piece of me in the form of Important Things I think she needs to know. I can’t be there to teach you these things, I told her, so I am sending this book instead. Use it to have more-awesome friends, way more fun, and a better life.

Yay.

So let’s talk about failure, shall we? Oh, yuck. Failure. Nobody likes that. I sure don’t. In fact, I’ll go to great lengths to avoid it. But in avoiding failure, I am also avoiding its juicy gifts. And within failure, if you go at it with an open mind, there are tons of good stuffs to learn. Here are two examples:

Example #1. My friend Mike Adamick might be the best dad I know. He stayed at home with daughter Emmeline until she went to kindergarten this year. I wish my dad had been more like Mike. Mike sews. He makes pirate ships big enough to hold one small girl — and helps her set sail in a pond. He explores the city. And he can make a crab cam. Out of an iPhone. (The video Mike made from the crab cam experiment was featured on Boing Boing – have a look.)

The lesson from the crab cam was simple. Sometimes your plans don’t work. So you go back and try something else. Not everything works the first time. Sometimes you learn more from mistakes and failure than you do from success. Do I smell a life lesson here? My kid could have used that lesson when giving up when his Lego creation fell apart. Instead of hurling the pieces across the room, if I had been an awesome mom like Mike is a dad, maybe my kid would have been able to go back to the drawing board and try again. That’s the theory, anyway.

Example #2. Last night I watched the movie Moneyball. Brad Pitt being understated and kind of vulnerable. Yum. But his character (real life Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane) had a Big Idea. He wanted to craft a winning team. And  to get there he saw he needed to go out of the box — on the advice of a nerdy straight-out-of-Yale economics grad who applied his smarts to baseball stats and took the emotional quotient of moving players around like chess pieces out of the game. Brad’s/Billy’s Big Idea was a total game-changer for baseball and he knew it. But everyone around him resisted. They told him he was nuts. They mocked him. And then the team started winning, using his plan. They had a record-breaking winning streak. And two seasons later the Boston Red Sox used his method to win the World Series. But Brad/Billy’s team lost that year. No inspiring World Series win, no mob scene of happy players high-fiving, no sound of popping champagne corks.

So what was learned? That his apparent failure was actually a smashing success. That thinking outside the box has amazing results. Brad/Billy hit a home run out of the park, even though his team lost the season in the end. The face of baseball has changed because of what he did — he believed and acted upon in a creative solution to his problem. And he followed it through. He went back to the drawing board when things weren’t working the regular way.

I love that there are real-world, adult-sized applications to the simple act of teaching kids that there is gold at the end of the rainbow and that a failure doesn’t necessarily mean you have failed. A lot of us could learn that. I hope we do.

That’s why we parents have to plan smart. And plan now. To kick our kids out of the country, where they’ll get a hella education and magically become way more employable.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at this awesome infographic. And while you’re eyeballing the cool retro travel feel, consider this statistic: 74% of employers said that studying abroad made prospective employees (that’s your kid and mine) more attractive when evaluating junior-level job candidates. Put that in your organic artisanal biodynamic grass-fed shade-grown pipe and smoke it.

Full disclosure: I’m biased. My kid is spending his second year of high school in France this very minute. He thinks it’s awesome and I believe that his life will be better because of it. Me, I was scared at that age. Not every kid is cut out for je ne sais quoi, but many are. Especially if we parents help them prepare (tip: start ‘em young).

So…what kind of kid is a candidate for study abroad?

Above-averagosity. It’s daunting enough doing Trigonometry without also doing it in a completely different language. It helps if your kid isn’t the kind who freaks out easily and is willing to sort of suck for a while until the language thing clicks (trust me, it’s a sink or swim thing so it tends to click pretty fast).

Low on the freak-out scale. It’s best if your kid isn’t too picky about anything. When you travel abroad, things are weird. Foods are weird. Beds are weird. Bathrooms are weird. Electrical outlet thingys are shaped differently. Not to mention that people are speaking a whole other language. It’s best if your kid can take things in stride. You could help this quality at home by planning ahead. Serving escargot tonight could be a start.

Curiosity does more than kill kittens. It’s a huge plus on the abroad-o-meter. They say that foreign exchange students are most successful when they say “yes” to everything. They’ll have more friends, see more of the country, meet more people, and have way more fun.

Oh, and the money thing? There are ways to make it happen without mortgaging your first-born, knocking over a bank or selling a kidney. AFS, the organization my son is participating through and probably the best-known foreign exchange program in the world, encourages creative measures to make study abroad affordable. Fundraising, scholarships, etc. There are several similar organizations with similar ideas. Or, the Rotary Club only asks families to pony up for plane fare, insurance and spending money. The tradeoff may be the amount of program support offered, so be sure to compare all your options.

I wish my parents had encouraged me to think and act globally. I like to think that we parents could help make some amazing changes to our world by helping our kids become global citizens.

I can see OCP now…eight tiny reindeer chained together in solidarity, shaking their tiny hooves at The Man. Squads of elves with their mouths symbolically duct-taped closed. Hand-painted signs hung from every fireplace mantle: “We are the 99% fat free.”

Santa’s plate of cookies has to go. Five ironclad reasons why:

1. Unwanted Cookies Are Unhappy Cookies. And unhappy cookies just don’t taste good. No one wants cookies at 2am. Trust me. After “sampling” the foil-wrapped chocolate balls that fill the bottoms of stockings and after two weeks consumption of stray raw cookie dough bits, the last thing anyone wants is a cookie.

2. Grubby Sticky Fingerprints. Mmm, you know the ones I mean. Yum, right? The slightly majorly squashed sad cookie that sensitive children feel compelled to deem special, like a dying Charlie Brown Christmas tree/firetrap, because sensitive children know in their hearts that Santa is kind and sensitive just like they are and will appreciate all the extra love that went into the making of that cookie. Yeah, that cookie. The sad squashed grubby ones taste better than the Martha-Stewart-Perfection ones, right?

Um, no. Especially not at 2am. Not even to Santa. Next.

3. Santa’s Freshman 15. Every freaking YEAR that guy puts on weight. What is UP with that?? Help a guy out, will you? I think he’d much rather have a nice glass of Zinfandel.

4. Cookie Fatigue. Or just plain fatigue. The kind that comes from weeks of late-night wrapping the gifts that bred in the closet since August and now stand in a mound as tall as a small elf. Cookie Fatigue + Elves makes cookies taste bad. Everyone knows this. What tastes way better is a roast beef sandwich.

5. Morning Comes Way Too Early. Especially when you’ve been up until 2 sneaking downstairs with the gifts that bred in the closet since August and now have turned into a gift-moat that surrounds the Christmas tree and that no one can get close enough to the tree now to plug the lights in. That is definitely when cookies just don’t do it.

No, what Santa really wants is a massage. And two weeks in Hawaii. I am pretty sure that Occupy Cookie Plate can get him that.

Wait. Actually, no, that’s not right. I did not suck. I rocked the holidays. I was Martha freaking Stewart. Stabbing out my eyeballs with a glue gun to the tune of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

If I had to do it over I would do holidays differently. I know exactly how it would go down. I would only need to change one thing. If I had known this at the time — that changing just  ONE FREAKING THING  would make all the difference and would turn a stress-filled eye-stabbing wine-gulping gray-hair-creating holiday into glittery chocolate-covered elf sparkles, than I would probably be a gazillionaire by now.

But since I am not a gazillionaire, and instead I am selling off the toys of my expensive past-life road bike hobby to pay rent, I will let you in on my secret to a rocking holiday.

Lower your expectations.

That’s it. Just take expectations to absolute zero rock bottom and let them stay there and hang out until New Year’s Day. Here’s why, the bullet point version:

• Less stress
• Way less work
• Probably costs less
• Can’t fail
• More singing
• Kids sleep better
• Heck, YOU sleep better (win)
• Freedom to create new rituals/throw out old ones
• Silliness
• There’s probably cake
• Memorable. Trust me.
• Way more fun

But hey, you are probably way ahead of me here. Maybe you did this years ago. I wish, the year I was driving all over Boulder Colorado on Christmas Eve to every candy store within 50 miles to find FOIL-WRAPPED CHOCOLATE SANTAS (they had to be a certain kind), that either

a) I had been successful in the glue gun eye stab, or

b) that someone had clued me in to the little secret that this stuff just didn’t matter. That I could stop sweating the small stuff. That I could relax on the memory-making and concentrate on the experience.

I wish someone had told me this. But they didn’t, so I am telling you now. But again, I bet you are way ahead of me. I’d love to know what you do in your house to dial down the holidays, relax expectations, and have more fun.

But the list is way too short. Five toys? Come on. Kids today want variety! Even my Luddite friends’ kids have more than five toys. So I’ve expanded GeekDad’s list and added five more awesome toys that stand the test of time. Ten toys should be enough for any kid.

Stick, Box. String, Cardboard Tube, and Dirt. Top Toys #1 - 5. Found in every kid’s toy box. And now I bring you…

6. Hand.

The good: Most kids have one. Often two. Hand is difficult to lose, since it usually comes pre-equipped with every child.

Uses: Hand is versatile. It wiggles. Two fingers become people who can walk, jump and dance. Hand can also create shadow puppets. Make music by repeatedly striking another Hand (if one is equipped). Hand can be a bird. Make shapes. Plug holes in dikes. Spell the alphabet. Hand is also a useful add-on to other toys not detailed here, like Body. It becomes Claw, for example, or Wings.

The not-so-good: Hand seems to lend itself to causing  collateral damage and squawking when combined with Sibling.

7. Rock.

The good: Rock is available all over the planet. Often small enough to be portable, Rock can be carried in pockets. One Rock is often interchangeable for another, since they often look alike. Rock comes in many colors, sizes and shapes. Appearance changes when wet. Rock can be combined with Hand and another Rock to make smaller Rocks.

Uses: Counting. Carrying in pockets. Collecting. Creating worlds for lizards. Marking locations of buried treasure.

The not-so-good: Rock, when combined with Hand, Throwing, and Sibling, can lead to disastrous results. Same when combined with Window.

8. Water.

The good: Readily accessible. Cleans up easily. Dries invisibly on most clothing articles. Malleable; changes form and shape with simple temperature fluctuations.

Uses: Can be easily combined with Boat, Stick, or Rock for endless hours of entertainment. Pourable. In winter, becomes Snow, a toy with many additional uses. In summer, becomes Lake and Pond, good for total immersion. Splashable. Can also actually be used to wash things, like Hand.

The not-so-good: When combined with Sibling, can lead to boisterousness and excessive splashing.

9. Sibling.

The good: Once one has been acquired, Sibling is usually readily accessible. Comes equipped with toys like Hand. With Imagination, knows uses for other toys like Stick, Rock and Dirt.

The not-so-good: Shouting, hair-pulling, hitting, and passive aggression are all too frequent misuses of Sibling. Often, use of Sibling requires parental supervision to avoid excessive boisterousness or disastrous results with toys like Rock combined with Hand. Siblings are also not easy to acquire and take time and financial outlay to keep for any appreciable length of time.

10. Broom.

The good: While not technically a toy, Broom has a multitude of uses and can actually be of help when wielded with its originally intended use. Broom is available in many models and also has a rich history, being the star of stories like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the Harry Potter series.

Uses: Flying, witchcraft, turning buckets into trained drones.

The not-so-good: Often there is resistance to using Broom for its intended purpose. Broom can also be combined with Sibling and wielded much like Stick, often causing injury. Instruction on uses for witchcraft are difficult to come by and carefully guarded.

There you have it. The Top Ten Toys. Have any others you think should have made the list?

[Non-PC Disclaimer Statement: With now 17% of this country's youth now squarely in the fat camp -- considered medically obese -- I don't see why I should tiptoe around the term. Fat. These kids are fat and I think there is no excuse and I am so going to use the word.]

I can see a case for blaming fat kids on Mom and Dad. After all, who buys the food in the house? Who sets the standard for healthy eating? Who locks (or doesn’t) the larder when Junior starts to outweigh his peers twice over? Is letting your kid get really really fat the same as abuse?

I can see a case for blaming pop culture. Mickey D’s. Taco Hell. High fructose corn syrup. Diet Coke for breakfast. The proliferation of cheap processed “food”. Long supermarket aisles devoted to snacks stuffed with hydrogenated fats and sugar. An endless mindsuck of TV commercials, mostly food-related. Yum.

I can see a case for blaming our food delivery system. Fresh whole foods, grown and treated without chemicals and minimally processed, are out of reach for many families stretching food dollars. I am surprised at the number of people who have never made a pot of beans or cooked a whole chicken, but a huge number of people have just never been exposed to much real cooking. It’s way easier to rip open a bag of Doritos than it is to make a salad. I get that.

I can see a case for blaming genetics. Born this way. Right? Fat kids have fat genes. Okay.

I can see a case for protecting fragile feelings. Who wants to hear a hard truth about himself? “Hey Johnny, you’re fat and you’re going to die early and you’re a drain on the medical system…” No one wants to hear that. Or be the one to say it. We have trained ourselves to instead say, “I love you the way you are. I love who you are INside.” We have so much unspoken judgment about appearance. It helps us feel better if we don’t have to own our judgments.

I can see a case for tough love. Boot camp. Full length mirrors. An army of support: personal trainers, therapists, nutritionists.

I am a little horrified about reports of obese kids being removed from their parents and placed in foster care, but on the other hand, is letting your kid get really fat a form of abuse? Who owns kids, anyway? Can the state just come in and take kids away if they’re fat? Should they?

I would like to think that most of us parents take true responsibility for our children. Most of us, if one of our children started tipping the scales too far, would take action. Get help. Be loving support. Make change.

I am a lot horrified that morbid obesity happens at all to children. I cannot imagine what it might feel like to be a prisoner of your own body that way. I cannot imagine NOT doing something to help someone from having to live in such an uncomfortable state.

I still don’t know whose fault fat kids are. I hope we start to wise up soon and figure it out before we all disappear into our couches.

And then I had kids, which felt like a huge gift in the naming do-over department. I could give them awesome names that rocked! If I loved the names I gave my kids, hopefully they would too. So far, the feedback is that I did okay, even in the middle name arena. In fact, I was so surprised by the middle names we parents are handing our kids. They’re so…middle-y. Which leads me to wonder whether we need them at all. Are they just a syllable filler between the first name and the last name? Are they a way to let the kid know he has REALLY transgressed (”John Michael Smith, you come here this minute and explain the peanut butter on your sister!”)?

Do we need middle names?

Top three middle names for boys and girls, according to Babble.com:

1. Marie.

2. Rose.

3. Elizabeth

1. James.

2. Michael.

3. John.

Ho. Hum. Yawn. I mean, these are totally good solid names. Totally. And except for Elizabeth, they don’t have a lot of letters, which makes them easy to fit on forms like standardized tests, birth certificates and marriage licenses. They are easy to pronounce. Hard to lose. You know where you stand with these names. Who you are. They sound good in between first names and last names.

But they are boooring. I want sexy names. Unusual names. Names that maybe can stand on their own if my kid decides his first name doesn’t rock as much as I think it will.

Check these baby naming trends for 2012. Middle names that aren’t a connector! Yay!

And while you are at it, spill. What middle names did you give your kids? I’ll go first: of my four kids, one has a safe middle name (Lynn) and the other three have standalone middle names (Orion, Leilani, Walden). How did you come up with middle names for your kids?

Photo: nkzs, Stock Xchang