Announced as a child enrichment website with easy-to-follow messages for young children, Kidz4Mation, a UK-based child development business, launched its unique, new website, http://www.kidz4mation.com on May 31, 2009.

“Our goal is to create a resource web site where parents and teachers can visit and download fully-illustrated personal development ebooks for children, materials that will make a difference in their lives and be fun and appealing,” said Hitul Thobhani, co-founder of Kidz4Mation.

“We want to be a resource when there is a need for parental and education tools to help in the ever-challenging support of raising children in their formative years.”

Kidz4mation.com features six beautifully illustrated ebooks for download, each with a message of positive development. Mikey Helps Toot Toot stresses that a thought is a thing: one positive thought leads to another. The theme of Tiggle Takes Off! is to be grateful for what you have. Mikey Says I Can Do It sends a message of limiting beliefs and addressing them with positive affirmations.

Mikey Aces His Test is about what to say to yourself to be successful. Mikey Takes a Moment! focuses on calming the mind with meditation. And the theme of Chik Chik’s Cap is raising self-esteem for the differently enabled.

The lesson in each story is reinforced by questions and exercises for children in the form of Mikey says sections. Also, parents/teachers notes help facilitate learning in the classroom and home.

Kidz4Mation plans to continuously add resource links to subjects like the influence of proper nutrition on a child’s behavior as well as online child development training.

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Today’s Wall Street Journal features a review of two books, The Parents We Mean to Be by Richard Weissbourd, and Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy.  I’m not sure why they are reviewed together, except that they do have a common theme of parents backing off and leaving their kids alone a little bit.

Weissbourd’s book focuses on how parents have failed to provide moral leadership, instead focusing on either self-esteem or success.  This can lead to a total failure to teach kids the hard lessons of life such as working hard and doing the right thing, or, conversely, it can lead to kids under so much pressure to succeed that they stagger under the burden.  In neither case are children becoming good, moral citizens–they’re just becoming some combination of selfish and successful. 

The book by Skenazy is about how we over protect our kids, so much so that they don’t learn to live with failure or to take care of themselves.  The WSJ article writes:

Ms. Skenazy, a humor columnist, believes we should give “our children the freedom we had without going nuts with worry.” She lampoons safety-obsessed parents who see a threat-filled world, from metal baseball bats and raw cookie dough to Halloween-candy poisoners and kidnappers. She advises turning off the news, avoiding experts and boycotting baby knee pads “and the rest of the kiddie safety-industrial complex.”

I can go with Weissbourd’s thesis that parents’ job is not to make kids feel good, but to make them be good.  I see a tragic lack of moral guidance from parents toward their kids.  I give my kids as much freedom as I possibly can, and my DH and I work hard to help them become independent and to responsible.  A big part of that is us explaining the moral implications of actions and words, and them accepting the consequences of their actions and words.  We seldom let them off the hook just because it would make them feel bad.

But I’m a little more hesitant to accept Skenazy’s idea that we shouldn’t worry so much about our kids.  Anyone who reads newspapers or magazines, who watches the news, or who gets amber alerts on their cell phones knows that there are scary people out there who actively want to hurt our children.  Clearly, we have to hold on loosely.  But if we don’t protect them, who will?  What are we here for, if not that?