Am I being greedy for liking the prospect of saving $2,500 each year I have a kid in college? In my case that could add up to a total savings of $20,000. I have two sons who would be attending undergraduate school back to back – One will finish (I hope), just as the other is set to start (I hope).

If you haven’t been able to keep track of all the financial news coming out of Washington, D.C., these are the broad strokes:

– Already approved in the federal stimulus package are two years of $2,500 federal tax credits for college expenses.

 

– Those annual tax credits would become permanent under the President’s proposed budget. Of course this would need to be approved by Congress.

 

The argument in favor of the tax credits? As so many are noting in these days of economic high anxiety, college education benefits not only the individual, but our nation as a whole. The U.S. faces increasing worldwide competition and that competition is increasingly over knowledge and ideas – the stuff of education, which would be encouraged by easing the cost of college. Of course this argument conveniently matches my own economic self-interest. 

On the other side? I haven’t read specific arguments against the education tax credits yet, but I imagine the same arguments against the overall Obama budget might might apply – they will be expensive and help run up deficits in the trillions over the next 10 years.

Of course those deficits come on top of all the other red ink this country has been running up and committing to in recent years- such as the long-term cost of the war in Iraq and the various bank and auto industry bailouts. Together those figures have been reported to add up into the trillions.

So maybe the issue comes down to this: What should we be spending our money on? What do you think? Please let us know.

We took our toddler to a lab yesterday for what turned out to be an anything-but-routine blood-lead shot.

This is a shot that engenders much fear in parents because it tells them whether their kids’ toys or apartment paint are shedding dangerous levels of lead. But that wasn’t my focus when I realized that the shot would be in my son’s arm and he’d be looking right at the needle. All his other shots have been to the upper thigh, usually just quick stabs. Painful, of course, but not the long, drawn out ordeal he was about to face.

As I held my son’s arm in place, the technician, whose hand was shaking to begin with, wrapped the tourniquet around his upper arm and began searching for a vein. He couldn’t find one. He went to the other arm, couldn’t find one there either, and ended up calling a colleague to help him.

By then, my son knew what was up and began howling. They finally found a vein and he screamed even louder as the needle went in. When the technician switched collection tubes, he tapped at the needle to better draw the blood. Each time he tapped, the needle tugged at the skin a little more. My son was already so upset about the shot that he might not have realized it. But I felt each little tap.

My son was not a happy camper during that cold stroll back to our apartment. But he soon forgot it and was fine within an hour or so, walking around and chewing everything in sight.

Hopefully, all the extracurricular eating he does won’t add up to significant lead levels in his blood.

Single-parent blogger Jennifer Wolf addresses an interesting issue in her About.com column: Are single parents included under “families” getting a helping hand in the new economic stimulus package? Well, according to her, the wording of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 suggests not.

There’s at least some legs to the issue: Examiner.com picked it on their site. To me, it’s less about the stimulus package and more about the redefinition of “family,” as Wolf points out. I suppose there’s two viewpoints on this: A family should legally be a traditional family, or it should be much more loosely defined. The latter is up for interpretation, either a household of children and at least one adult in a parenting role, or whatever. And you could argue that the traditional family definition ignores some demographic realities.

No doubt the issue is heightened when you’re talking about who gets stimulus money and how much is out there to give. But I suspect it’s a gray area we’re going to have to define at some point or other.

Interesting issue tackled by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. The paper’s advice column fielded a question from a woman complaining that her boyfriend of three years was allowing his grown daughter to live in his house rent free. It has apparently become enough of an issue that she’s contemplating ending the relationship.

The paper’s answer? Since the girlfriend doesn’t live in the house and doesn’t contribute to the rent, it’s none of her business how the man runs his house.

This is not that far off an issue in single-parent relationships and within blended families, where turf issues—both physical and in terms of parental limits—are typical. What do you think?

I got my 11-year-old son a cell phone.

I know, why does an 11-year-old need a cell phone? I actually dwelled on this for a while, understanding that some of his schoolmates have had them for a couple of years. And I wondered why he would need one. The upside was that he would be able to reach out to us in an emergency or if there was a change in plans during afterschool activities or while at a friend’s house for the day. The downside was, well, why does he need it?

So, in the end I got him one, and I figured it was a good exercise in responsibility for him: Manage your  minutes, use it wisely and you’ll be able to keep it. As an aside, I also wanted him to have a way to keep in touch with his cousin, who he is very close with and who he is likely to see less off now that my ex’s mom—their grandmother—passed away at the end of last year. She was the glue that kep those kids in touch. Now they’re able to text and stay in touch regularly.

But I wondered about what it would cost. I have friends whose kids chalked up hundreds of dollars in cell phone bills after first getting one. So I waited for the “report card” — the first cell phone bill since we added him to our calling plan. Well, it came this week, and he’s well within his minutes. Phew.

Still, was it still a good idea? What age should we be hooking up our kids with telecommunication gadgets?

I wrote a check early this morning for $4 at the request of my 7-year-old daughter, who wanted to buy “Hotel for Dogs,” the book upon which the popular movie was based. Her second grade teacher sends home a pamplet every month from Scholastic Inc.,  the publisher of popular books for kids.

Of course there’s no obligation to buy anything. But try telling that to a 7-year-old, I’ve noticed lately that there’s a lot more than books in the listing that my school gives my child. Among the items Scholastic hawks to kids are posters, junky toys both separately and packed together with books, and electronic games.

Later in the day I read that a group called the “Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood”:http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/621/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26599 has started a campaign to try to stop in-school book club sales from including things other than books.

A review by the group of Scholastic’s elementary and middle school book clubs found that one-third of the items for sale are either not books or are books packaged with other items such as jewelry and toys.

They are starting an online e-mail campaign to try to stop Scholastic from selling so much junk to kids. Sounds like a great idea.

It’s a little bit different than the dilema plaguing many families across the nation right now. My son has too much health care coverage. This is the kind of thing you’d only get from layers of blind bureaucracy.

In a nutshell, my son has been on my health plan since my ex and I split up. No problem there. Recently, she added he husband and his son to her health care plan. Somehow, the paperwork was mixed and my son ended up on her plan too. Except we didn’t know right away. Anyway, she finds out and confirms this at her job and we discuss it. She suggests leaving him on her plan and we agree to do so. Obviously, I agree to remove my son from my plan. Seems simple.

Now, this is the kind of arrangement my ex and I have always been able to follow through on amicably. I’ve paid his health care costs for six years, and she figured it seemed fair that, given the inadvertent mess up by her health insurance carrier, we use the opportunity to have her pick up the costs to even things out. Seems fair. I know full well that health care costs are routine issues in custody disputes, and I am grateful that in this instance it has never been an issue.

Well, it wasn’t so simple. My health insurance provider says I had to make the change by Jan. 31, or I have to wait a year. I get it: That’s the rule. But that there’s no flexibility at all seems, well, bureaucratic. Oh, they are sending me an appeal request form, which will be considered and processed after a month of review.

I suppose the upside is that my son won’t be lacking for health care this year. But it strikes me as unfair that there are kids out there with no health coverage and my son is covered under two plans.

I enjoyed Jorge’s blog about taking his son to his first Metallica concert.

My son is a bit too young to appreciate Metallica. He’s 14-months-old. Although he does stomp around the apartment like he’s ready to smash a guitar or bite off the head of a chicken.

No, Laurie Berkner is more his speed. If you don’t know about Laurie Berkner, she’s the rage among little kids and toddlers. Okay, she has been for the better part of a decade but I’d never heard of her until my wife handed me a CD a few months back at the start of a long drive.

I must admit I didn’t quite get the attraction early on. Actually, by the first exit on the NJ Turnpike I was ready to tear my hair out. But it was keeping him relaxed and who wants to drive with a cranky kid.

Some of the lyrics seemed a bit, how should I say it, ridiculous. And as we got into the DVDs, I wondered about what he might be learning from these songs. There was one about chickens where she had the little groupies shaking eggs really hard. That’s fine if they were soon to be scrambled – but what if they were the little chick variety and these kids were giving them permanent brain damage. Really, these were things I thought about.

But my son was mesmerized. He really enjoys the songs and even dances a bit to them. If you count two steps back, one step forward dancing. (We do)

So what really counts is that I can sit there with my son, humming along, watching him break out into a smile each time that pig shows up on Laurie’s head. Which will be fine until he’s ready to sing along to Van Morrison and The Band.

And lately the songs are growing on me.

There’s one about Victor Vito and Freddie Fasco that’s particularly catchy and includes words like Tabasco, rutabaga and collared greens. How can you complain about a kids song that has the words Tabasco,  rutabaga and collared greens?

So, yes, sometimes I find myself singing “Victor Vito” or “Under a Shady Tree” or “We are the Dinosaurs”.

Which Jorge is happy about because it means I no longer sing “Cripple Creek” all day long at my desk.

Last year I took my son to his first “concert:” a performance by Ringo Starr and his all star band at Radio City Music Hall. This time we turned it up a notch.

The truth is my 11-year-old is a metal-head with a guitar teacher who is a Metallica nut. So I bit: Two weeks ago I took him to see Metallica at the Prudential Center in Newark, with ear-plugs in tow. Now, I think we’re fortunate to be in a situation where it’s common for my generation to have similar musical tastes with our children, simply because we grew up on rock. And, let’s face it, Metallica has been around long enough that it they were a big deal in my college and post-college days.

So we were able to share the experience. To me, it was a great bonding experience, similar to my view on video games. He and I play X-Box together all the time, which I enjoy as long as his schoolwork is done and we still put aside time to do more traditional recreational activities.

Still, I’ve had other parents express surprise that I would take my son to a heavy metal show and that I would devote so much time to playing video games with him. Is there a viewpoint out there that those things either cut into traditional parent-child relationships or are prematurely exposing kids to “older kid” activities?