The Chatterbox

Welcome to The Chatterbox, our new weekly blog post covering news stories and other online items that have us talking here at TOC Kids. Join in the conversation by leaving your thoughts in the comment section below—we'd love to hear from you. 

• First, a very interesting take on the "Do we or don't we reveal the gender of our baby?" debate. You might have heard that a couple in Toronto with a five-month-old child has decided not reveal the infant's sex to anyone, including her/his grandparents. As you can imagine, the story has generated a ton of debate on a variety of news sites and blogs. The Discovery Channel's online coverage gets extra points for a thoughtful look at a complex topic, and for making a point to distinguish between between biological sex and gender expression.
  
  
• Michelle Obama will be on hand to help the USDA replace its two-decade-old food guide pyramid on June 2, with a “plate” making more clear that half of a healthy diet should consist of fruits and vegetables. There’s a smaller circle separate from the plate to represent dairy. The pyramid, dating back to 1992 and revised in 2005, “basically conveys no useful information,” says chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health Walter C. Willett, according to The New York Times.
  
  
• Chantal Martineau's blog post on the food pyramid subject at the Village Voice asks, “Isn’t there a bit too much stock being placed in the infographic (much like the guidelines themselves, which are too sweeping to be of any real help to an individual seeking nutritional advice)? Is the food pyramid to blame for the current obesity epidemic? Fat kids surely won’t be saved by a pie chart. They can only be saved by eating less pie. Which means that a new poster on the wall at school is really just a tiny sliver of the equation.”
  
  
• American Airlines is going to start requiring families to check strollers that weigh more than 20 pounds or do not fold up. It's going to be a huge issue for parents of babies and toddlers. "I know I would not have been able to carry all of our stuff and two babies through an airport and to the gate when the kids were small," says TOC Kids Editor Judy Sutton Taylor.
  
  
• The new CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Jean-Claude Brizard, made an appearance on Fox Chicago this morning, discussing a range of topics—including the controversy surrounding magnet and charter schools, the new education reform bill and when he will begin to implement his new plans for CPS. You might remember Brizard's start in Chicago was a bit rocky, as his track record as Superintendent of Rochester City Schools was heavily debated.
  
  
• The Sun Times reported today that Mayor Rahm Emanuel joined Comast to launch a new "Internet Essentials" program, which will provide broadband Internet service to the families of CPS students who qualify for free lunches. The service, which typically costs $48.95-per-month, will be offered at a discounted rate of $9.95-per-month with no installation fees. The program, the first of its kind in the U.S., aims to reach the nearly 40-percent of Chicago residents who have limited access to the Internet.
  
  
• Finally a (rather snarky) op ed from Slate.com in which Simon Doonan, creative ambassador-at-large for Barneys New York and regular guest on reality show America's Next Top Model, describes his love/hate relationship with young people, complaining that our culture tends to "fetishize and overpraise the young." The best line to summarize the piece? "Suri Cruise is the new Sumner Redstone."