This is a parenting page, about parenting Page. I am a child psychologist and a mother. So I specialize in children, yet I am human, thus I am full of knowledge and yet as full of emotions as any other parent. So I decided to write this Parenting Page since it might be informative and funny for others to take an insider look at a child specialist raising her child. I also wanted to create a way to show Page when she grows up, if she chooses to have children, a real-life view of the experience. I hope you enjoy these stories and musings.

Finding appropriate television shows for tweens to watch was a challenge for me. When Page was a child, she was allowed to watch the Disney channel, and all was well with the world. The shows geared toward the preschool to the 8-to-10-year-old crowd were great. Funny, interesting, and they taught life lessons and skills such as math, geography, etc. in a fun way. When Page outgrew those, she started watching the Disney channel shows and other channels geared toward tweens and early teens. In my opinion, these shows were awful! Primarily because the kids were all mouthy. They had horrible attitudes and were just not nice. Very sassy, disrespectful, rude kids had become the norm on TV. I don’t know when that happened, and I can’t imagine why. I was horrified when I would see these shows with Page, and I believe they contributed to her becoming mouthier. I stopped allowing her to watch some shows, but it was hard because TV is a part of our lives and we did need shows she’d find interesting to her at her age.

Family_affair_1967Then one Christmas, my mother sent Page the full series of Family Affair, circa 1966-1971. There were Buffy and Jody and Sissy, all dealing with life’s challenges without having to be snarky! I had grown up with this show and loved seeing it again all these decades later, and Page liked it too. But even better received by Page was The Brady Bunch, which we bought as a gift for her the following Christmas. However, fair warning that the first episode has a moment most people in this day and age would not consider appropriate for family TV geared toward kids. The pilot shows the wedding of Mike and Carol Brady, and before the ceremony both adults are nervous. Talking on the phone, Mike expresses his high level of anxiety, and Carol says oh-so-nonchalantly, “Why don’t you just take a tranquilizer?” To which Mike replies, “I did, but it didn’t help.” What?!! When we watched this there were several adults in the room and one tween, Page, and the adults all burst out laughing, because it was so ridiculous to treat tranquilizers that casually, as if every family had them in stock. That resulted in us having to explain to Page what a tranquilizer is, which is not how I imagined our intro to The Brady Bunch to turn out. However, aside from Mrs. Brady treating tranquilizers as one would a soothing cup of tea or taking an aspirin for a headache, the rest of The Brady Bunch was as we had hoped: life lessons in a fun, non-mouthy, good-attitude manner. Page loved it! And she really did become less snarky herself with us when she had better TV role models her age.

Dr. Tina Lepage is the owner of Lepage Associates Solution-Based Psychological & Psychiatric Services, a group practice with offices in S. Durham/RTP, Chapel Hill, and Raleigh. She lives in Chapel Hill with her husband, daughter, and two dogs. www.lepageassociates.com. You can find her on Twitter at @LepageAssoc or at Facebook.com/LepageAssociates.