Your guide to activities and fun things to do with your preschoolers, toddlers and kids in silicon valley, CA

Weight Bias and Self Esteem in Children: an Interview with Emme

by bonggamom

February 23, 2009

 This week is National Eating Disorders week, and raising awareness is more important that ever.  It may be tempting for parents of young children to dismiss eating disorders as an adult or teenage diseases -- but 1 in 5 children today are obese, and we are seeing more and more children under the age of twelve developing eating disorders.  It is estimated that 40% of nine year olds have already ideted and we are beginning to see four and five year olds expressing the need to diet. 

As parents, it is more important than ever to teach our children NOW how to eat healthy, have a healthy image of themselves.  It is just as important for parents to be aware of the physical and emotional consequences of weight disorders, whether in our own children or other children.  So to educate ourselves, a handful of Savvy Source city editors spoke with supermodel Emme Aronson on the issues of body image and weight bias.  A perennial style icon and self esteem advocate, Emme is also a spokesperson for Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.  Here is what she told us:

One Last Weekend Outlook: January 30th-February 1st

by Shawn Burns

January 28, 2009

This is Resolution month at Savvy Source, and it's become obvious in the past couple of weeks that I need to make one myself, and follow-through on it. I need to step back from the site and spend time working on my "About Me" page. See where it says "is in the middle of his PhD"? Yeah, turns out the middle is a churning mess and I need to dog-paddle a little bit. So this is a  Read more...

Weekend Outlook: January 16th-18th

by Shawn Burns

January 14, 2009

This weekâ??s Weekend Outlook is in honor of a very special occasion: My 10th Anniversary! Wowâ?¦it seems like only yesterdayâ?¦ Anyway, my wife and I are running away together for the weekend and I thought this would be a great opportunity to help you plan a few fun things to do with your own partner, as you dump the kids with a relative, babysitter, or stranger you find at the gas  Read more...

Introducing Bonggamom

by Bonggamom

October 10, 2008

When I first moved to the Bay Area, I was a 22-year old grad student. The Philippines had always been my home. I knew no-one at Stanford and I was living far, far away from family and friends for the first time in my life. I remember turning the thermostat in my student apartment up to 85 degrees each and every winter night (my hot and sweating roommates kept turning it back down) and telling  Read more...

Park Day: Central Park (New York)

by Shawn Burns

October 06, 2008

Ah, this is a tricky one, right? See, my wife and I went away for the weekend, leaving our daughter home with grandma. They hit our usual haunts, and from all reports our meticulous list of instructions was both appreciated and totally unnecessary. We missed her more than we realized, and on our weekend trip to New York we found ourselves constantly seeing things that we would love to be  Read more...

The Going Away List

by Shawn Burns

October 03, 2008

My wife and I are going out of town, alone, this weekend. This means that our daughter will be in her grandmother's care. I know that couples go out of town all the time and there's nothing to worry about, but, well, I worry. And my wife worries. And in our overactive imagination state we turn into insane planners. So what have we done to set our minds at ease on our trip? 1. Contact  Read more...

List Day: What did you miss?

by Shawn Burns

September 30, 2008

September closes with a hearty "bye bye", one of my daughter Erin's first phrases. For a long time it was also her signal to me that whatever it was she was saying "bye bye" to, like the vacuum cleaner, needed to go away. Real soon now. Communication is the key to sociability, and that has been the enduring theme of September here at Savvy Source . This month we've learned a number of  Read more...

My Social Life

by Shawn Burns

September 16, 2008

Having a daughter has changed a lot of things around here, not least of which is the ways in which my wife and I socialize with other adults now. Today on Savvy Source we're talking about The Social Lives of Parents , and I'm wracking my brain trying to think of what the heck we used to do around here. I used to spend a lot of time at The Nut House on California Ave in Palo Alto. I liked it  Read more...

List Day: First Day of Pre-school

by Shawn Burns

September 02, 2008

Happy Day-after-Labor-Day! In my ancient homeland (Canada) this day is the national go-back-to-school day for everyone. So I always get a little autumnally excited when this day rolls around: I smell pencil shavings and plastic binders, my clothes always feel as though they still have tags on them, my shoes squeak like new, and I can feel the weight of a full, new pad of paper in my hand.  Read more...

A Look Back at July

by Shawn Burns

July 31, 2008

July is over. It was packed with trips and visitors, and August, up there ahead, looks more and more like the dog days of summer. We've driven through the mountains to Santa Cruz, listening to our favorite summer songs all the while. We ran away to a local hotel because we wanted to do some fake camping. We visited the Childrens Discovery Museum and had a great time in the Wonder  Read more...

The Gym

by Shawn Burns

July 18, 2008

I am an at-home dad. Part of what that means is that I don't get a lot of time "away" from Erin. And if I want to get any exercise at all it's going to be either with her, or on a day when her mom is home and I can go off for a bike ride on my own. But many gyms in the area cater to those of us with kids in tow. I went shopping for gyms a few months ago to replace all of those long bike rides I  Read more...

Ice Cream on the Peninsula

by Shawn Burns

June 30, 2008

Happy Canada Day, my ex-pat Canadian friends. Mentally, tomorrow is the official first day of summer for me. And with summer comes ice cream, so how appropriate that on this last day of June, just in time for summer I give you look at Peninsula ice cream destinations. But instead of just presenting a straightforward list, I'm going to present them a little competitively. Frozen Yogurt Face Off  Read more...

Date Night

by Shawn Burns

June 20, 2008

The Silicon Valley is not The City. And Emily and I aren't 24 anymore, so the idea of spending a night sitting at a dive bar somewhere in the Mission isn't that appealing anymore. But the thought of sitting at a dive bar in Santa Clara and singing karaoke with strangers sounds awesome. To me, at least. When we first lived in San Jose we once went to what I can only describe as a karaoke hotel,  Read more...

Introduction

by Shawn Burns

May 21, 2008

I moved to San Jose in 1996. For a girl. We lived in southern San Jose for a year in our teens, and then moved to San Diego for most of our twenties. We married, we went to school. We figured out what we wanted to do with our lives and we moved back to the Silicon Valley in 2005. In 2007 we welcomed our daughter, Erin, to the world and to the area. Once my wife returned to her job after a  Read more...