How do you treat this request? Toss $10 or $15 or $20 into the kitty? I mean, we’re “supposed” to tip our garbage guys, hairdresser, grocery clerk, bank teller, mail person etc etc this time of year. Why not teachers?

Ruff Ruminations went and canvassed teachers in her area and this is what they said:

Often they do not use or like to receive the gift cards as they are for items like coffee or restaurants and one can only go to the same place so often or they might not even drink coffee or like to take luxurious bathes.

They prefer the gifts with meaning that are handmade

They feel uncomfortable receive expensive gifts [Ruff Ruminations]

$10 is no big deal, in the grand scheme of the excellent teaching and attention my son’s teachers give. It’s less than the tip I’ll give some bar star waitress to bring me a steak and a beer at a restaurant.

Still, we go the handmade route when it comes to gifts for our “support staff” (teachers, garbage, mail, neighbors etc) this time of year. Something the kids help make, something that has a personal effort put into it, something from the heart.

Superstore has bakeware that you can buy and then give away. They’re lined cardboard boxes that not only let you bake brownies or banana bread, but provide a cute box that you can giveaway. They come in packs of 4 squares or 6 loaves for $10 and also have red ribbons to tie a jaunty bow.

In the gift boxes, we bake Ghirardelli Brownies.

In 2010, Oprah named it one of her favorite things and The Today Show did a survey on best instant brownies and this won. They are fabulous. We bought a fleet of the instant mix at Costco last year when it was on sale.

If you prefer to go from scratch, here’s a knock off recipe that claims to be better if you can’t find the box. You could also fill the boxes with Christmas pastries, tarts or these simple peanut butter cookies.

We solved it simply by making some of the best brownies in the world.

What gifts do you give to your children’s teachers?

When I was growing up the school picture was the picture of record for the year. In a film camera world, photos would be taken on summer vacation, birthdays and Christmas – that was about it. Photographs were a special event sort of thing, not an every day occurrence.

The school picture was the one Nan would have on her credenza to show off to her friends. We would only see her a couple of times a year – now my sons can Skype their Nana anytime they want.

Photography is no longer a luxury. Digital means we dont have to ration out our picture taking. We can take hundreds or thousands a month and can archive just the dozens that are decent. My son knows how to take pictures using my iPhone and is eager to learn how to use my DSLR – he’s 3.

Yet picture day is still a day circled on the calendar to make sure our kids look their ‘Sunday best.’

Why is that?

School picture day should be obsolete. School yearbooks should have faded away in this YouTube era, Facebook should have made high school reunions redundant.

Yet all those still hang around and linger as old timey traditions of the past.

Still, I’ll concede it was fun to get Zacharie ready for picture day this week, but I’m not looking forward to the photo pack prices when the pictures are processed. Can’t we just each pay the photographer a couple of bucks for their time and get an email of the jpg?

Instead we’ll be urged to buy wallets, 3×5, 4×6 and 5×7 images at ridiculous prices. In the 70s and 80s we needed the school photographer to be that intermediary and print off the photos. Now, for less than $100, I can get a photo quality printer to fire off as any images on to paper as I want at the same quality.

I just want a picture of my son as my wallpaper on my iPhone – and I don’t need school picture day to make that happen.

The evening was presented by Gillian Ashley-Martz, a Registered Clinical Counsellor, a mother of two and Certified Canadian Family Educator who has been working with families for over ten years.

A few dads were dragged to the class, but it was mostly moms and I was definitely the only one liveblogging it on Twitter.

The program started with a brainstorm of words to describe toddlers.

irrational, short fuse, demanding, manipulative, selfish, whiny, sensitive, strong willed, testing, stubborn, loud, serious, impatient, persistent

Those were the first ones tossed out by the moms, til I joked that I was “sensing a trend.” The tide turned, we remembered these are OUR kids we were talking about and a few glowing words were added.

silly, loving, smart, funny, energetic, curious

Still, you get the idea: life with toddlers can be a battle and this class was going to try and explain why it’s a battle and how the whole family can come out winners.

After the brainstorm, Gillian explained to us that our “toddlers live in the moment. They dont have the ability to see into the future and realize what’s going to happen, so they are obsessed with the moment and the present.”

This “in the moment” behaviour causes a struggle as the toddler relies on instinctive behaviour instead of thinking things through. Parents are, on average, pulled in to a power struggle of some kind with their toddler every 20 minutes.

Gillian reminded us that “never again will you see such a passionate child. They havent developed any defenses around their emotions. It’s all they’re about. What they feel, is what you see.”

Part 2 of Toddler 101: the toddler job description.

This generation of children is the most pampered and protected of its kind in all of history. Of course, that’s probably been true of every subsequent generation of the past 150 years, if not longer. Still, some instances of helicopter parenting are particularly exasperating. One is the radical change in children being restricted from walking to and from school on their own.

The Saturday New York Times took on this provocative issue:

In 1969, 41 percent of children either walked or biked to school; by 2001, only 13 percent still did, according to data from the National Household Travel Survey. In many low-income neighborhoods, children have no choice but to walk. During the same period, children either being driven or driving themselves to school rose to 55 percent from 20 percent. Experts say the transition has not only contributed to the rise in pollution, traffic congestion and childhood obesity, but has also hampered children’s ability to navigate the world.

The article, as it happens, describes an incident from “a Vancouver suburb”:

Lisa Reid, who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia, had signed a permission form, but when her first-grader proudly told his teacher he was walking home himself last spring, a distance of six houses, the teacher was incredulous. She took him to the office and called Mrs. Reid, who didn’t hear the phone. That was because Mrs. Reid was pacing at the end of the driveway, waiting for her son, her worries climbing exponentially as the moments ticked by.

The article goes on to explain that–the math here is mine–a child is more than 2000 times likelier to be injured in a car accident than be abducted by a stranger. There are the 62 million American children under the age of 14, and only about 115 of them are abducted by strangers every year. In Canada, there are about 40 to 50 stranger abductions a year.

I wonder why it’s so much higher, per capita in Canada? Maybe there are differences in how the crime is defined? In Canada, a stranger is apparently anybody other than a parent or guardian–”a close friend, neighbour, uncle, grandparent or another family member”. I wasn’t able to find a definition for ’stranger abduction’ in the US.

In short, the odds of a particular child being abducted are extremely small. Not to be all “when I was a young’un”, but the truth is that the abduction risk hasn’t changed since I walked about 500 meters home from elementary school in the eighties.

I should recognize that there are still many levelheaded parents out there. Derek, for example, lets his kids walk to school (and take other risks). It’s a little sad, if not surprising, that our the majority’s perceptions have so overruled the very safe reality.

While writing this post, I remembered the excellent map that accompanies this Daily Mail article.

About This Author: Darren Barefoot is a leading social media strategist from Victoria, BC. He and wife Julie Szabo have no children, but they are building a beautiful home on Pender Island. You can follow Darren @dbarefoot

Photo: “Two Happy Girls” from Pink Sherbet Photography