My three-year-old son Emile has finally recovered from his recent surgery and begun packing on the pounds he lost while unable/unwilling to eat. During the nearly two-week recovery following the removal of his adenoids and tonsils we, of course, offered him plenty of soft sweets—popsicles, Jell-O, ice cream, pudding, and Kinder eggs. The highlight was a batch of Yo Gabba Gabba cupcakes (hand-delivered by some amazing friends at their young daughter’s behest), which blew his little mind. (He ate Brobie first, obviously.)

But what also blew his mind was all the sugar.

Now, my wife and I are not fascists about sugar, but we are pretty hardcore. As far as E is concerned, chocolate milk is unsweetened chocolate almond milk, which has zero sugar. We don’t have juice in the house, so that’s something that he usually gets only at birthday parties or daycare functions. I take him to the Brazilian Bakery on occasion so we can get custard tarts and on hot days we’ll duck down to the gelateria—but both are special treats. We just don’t have sweets lying around, so he doesn’t often ask.

Oh, but he’s sure asking for them now. During that first week post-op, E refused almost everything, including sweets, so when he finally started eating we gave him whatever he wanted. But now he has a taste for it. He wants ice cream for breakfast, dessert after every meal, and, rather than his usual water, he keeps requesting juice, a.k.a. the devil’s drink.

We have always preferred to give Emile fruit as a treat. It’s nature’s candy, after all, and we always keep a wide variety in stock. So we’re now slowly weaning him off the empty calories and back onto the fruit, which has fibre and vitamins mixed in with its fructose.

And when I say wean, I’m not kidding. Sugar is basically a drug, as anyone who has seen their child’s personality change while candy, cake, or cookies work their black magic will tell you. It revs them up as the blood-sugar surge sparks a subsequent insulin spike, then brings them crashing down.

And, of course, there’s the whole childhood obesity epidemic, much of which can be attributed to the added sugar that is prevalent in most processed foods as well as sweets. (Exercise is vital to stay fit and healthy, but caloric intake is what ultimately determines weight.) The U.S. Center for Disease Control says that 44 per cent of toddlers are consuming sugary beverages daily—another study found half (!) of seven- and eight-month-olds are, too—and that the amount of calories in a young child’s average diet has gone up by 83 per cent.

And no wonder: The kid-targeted food industry has been jacking up the sweetness. The What to Expect site claims that “70 per cent of foods aimed at children—even those that claim to be nutritious—are loaded with added sugar.”

In Canada, it’s no better with another study finding over half of foods aimed at babies and toddlers had more than 20 per cent of their calories from sugar (or its sneakily named variants like high-fructose corn syrup, fruit-juice concentrate, sucrose, glucose, dextrose, cane juice, malt, molasses, lactose, honey, ethyl maltol, and maltodextrin).

Anti-sugar activists like pediatric endocrinologist Robert Lustig, who in late February co-authored a Nature article called “The Toxic Truth About Sugar,” argue sugar is poison and should be regulated like alcohol, through measures like additional taxes or sales bans around schools. This seems a mite excessive.

I remember going to the corner store near my elementary school and stocking up on penny and nickel candies and certainly wouldn’t want to deny that pleasure to my son. Candy, cookies, cupcakes, ice-cream, and chocolate are a kid’s only real options for vices—but, like any vice, access and amount should be tightly controlled. And that’s where parents need to parent.

The easiest thing to do is limit the added-sugar items in your house, be it obvious ones like sweetened breakfast cereal or insidious like “naturally flavoured fruit snacks” that boast of being organic and suitable for toddlers but have 6 grams of sugar in every 10 gram snack. It’s easy to blame the outside world, where places like the Science Centre spread candy piles all over the cafeteria in hopes of encouraging a meltdown-preventing purchase. But the Mayo Clinic actually says “more added sugars are consumed at home than at school, out of vending machines or at restaurants.”

We’re super lucky that Emile generally doesn’t have a sweet tooth. The first time we gave him proper sugar was the angel food cake my wife made for his very first birthday, but he just ate the strawberries off it and ignored the rest. Nowadays, I’ll buy him a lollipop and he’ll have a few licks and then wrap it back up for later. Same goes for ice cream, where he’s satisfied with a big bite and then puts the container back in the freezer. I have no idea how much of that is his personality and how much if it is due to our initial limiting of his sugar intake. A combination, maybe, but it’s a good balance that gets both him and us what we want. And it’s a combination we’re returning to.

Denying kids sweets altogether is cruel and inhuman punishment—and would eventually backfire as your kid gets older and sources it from elsewhere. The amount of happiness that those Yo Gabba Gabba cupcakes gave E was incredibly appreciated during a really tough time for him. But we still need to monitor and limit his sugar intake as much as is reasonable—or all that sweetness will turn sour.

My three-year-old son Emile had surgery a little over a week ago and, as I wrote in my previous column, the recovery from the removal of his adenoids and tonsils was far worse than the operation itself. But since I filed that story last Friday morning, it got considerably worse afterwards—in fact, almost immediately.

If this one reads less panicky than last week, it’s because though he’s not yet back at daycare, Emile is finally acting—and, more importantly, eating—like himself again following a frightening week during which he was regularly shrieking in agony or lying in stupor and lost 4 of his 30 pounds of body weight.

It’s been easily our most intense and scary week of parenting, with this past Monday and Tuesday being the worst, as his pain spiked well above his normal pain threshold, which is so high that he doesn’t blink when getting a vaccination shot.

But last Friday, my main concern was that he hadn’t eaten since the previous Tuesday, and had only just started drinking water in any real amount. In the early afternoon, just before nap, he started clutching his stomach and saying it hurt. I assumed it was because it was so empty, when all of a sudden he threw up all over me and his Homer Simpson stuffie. It was just water, with a few flecks of food, but I’d never actually seen Emile vomit before. I called my wife Carrie, and since his surgeon’s office voicemail said he’d respond in 2-3 days, she suggested I call Telehealth Ontario and ask their advice.

Except, as it turns out, they don’t really provide advice, at least not for any pressing issue. They just recommend you go to the emergency room, which, ironically, is a place Telehealth is supposed to make less crowded, not more.

After answering a half-hour’s worth of all-patient checklist questions from the registered nurse on the phone—including, absurdly, if he’d had any alcoholic beverages today—and waking Emile up repeatedly from his nap to answer questions and walk across the room, I was advised to take him to emergency.

My initial questions—about whether vomiting might be a side-effect of morphine or drinking water too fast, or if throwing up one time was something to be concerned about several days after the operation as we’d been told it might happen in the short-term—went unanswered.

She then asked if I was going to take him to emergency, to which I replied not yet. After all, spending six hours in the ER hardly seemed like the best thing for a three-year-old recovering from surgery, especially if there was no real concern.

Instead, we went to our pediatrician and she let us in even after they’d stopped seeing patients. She was not concerned by him throwing up once, or even by his lack of food so long as we kept him hydrated, but checked him out otherwise, reassured us that he was okay and then gave us a script for antibiotics in case a strep throat test came back positive over the weekend. (It did not.)

She also expressed exasperation when I explained what Telehealth told us, informing me that it was a private company (which I was unaware of) and that it seems they always tell people to go to emerg for fear of being sued. In fact, she said that ER visits have increased, rather than decreased, since Telehealth came online.

A few days later, her nurse, calling into check on how E was doing, further elaborated, noting that nurses are not allowed to diagnose patients, which is a doctor’s job. So the registered nurses manning Telehealth’s phone lines are simply not licensed to do much more than that for fear of being liable. “At the end of the day,” she said, “they just send everyone to emerg.”

I should add that I have a very positive Telehealth story, too. When Emile had a fever-induced febrile seizure in my arms at 18 months, my wife was out of town and I was actually on the phone with Telehealth asking advice because his temperature had spiked during his nap. When he started convulsing and I dropped the phone, the nurse called 911 and then called me back, talking me down while I waited for the paramedics to arrive. I could not have been more grateful.

But that was an extreme case where an emergency visit was obviously vital. If they’re telling everyone to do the same because they can’t diagnose or really provide any useful advice without seeing the patient in person—or, y’know, being a doctor—how is it even helpful? And does the fact that it’s privately run decrease its effectiveness due to fear of lawsuits?

Certainly, it’s not easy to find out that Telehealth is run by Sykes Assistance Services Corporation, which also provides roadside assistance, identity theft services and call centre outsourcing. In fact, Ontario’s healthcare site says it simply “is provided to residents of Ontario by the Government of Ontario and is free to all users.”

Ironically, the two press releases I dug up about Telehealth Ontario both boasted that service can help “Ontarians can save time, [and] trips to hospital emergency department.” Yet, at least anecdotally, that appears to not be the case.

The idea behind Telehealth is a great one—free, confidential 24-hour access to a healthcare professional who can provide more reliable advice than a Google search. Though the handful of other times my wife called about specific health concerns she was told to go to emergency, when she called last week to ask about giving Advil instead of the recommended Tylenol post-op—without mentioning Emile, thereby kicking off the checklist questions—she was connected to a pharmacist who explained why she should not. (It could cause internal bleeding and upset an empty stomach.)

But as ER doctor and blogger Dr. Alan Drummond put it earlier this year, generally the Telehealth system seems to be “fundamentally broken, ineffective and expensive.” (Oh yeah, it also costs taxpayers $39 a call, a figure that’s almost double that of other provinces.)

“Most emergency physicians that I know perceive no value to Telehealth lines for there seems to be a steady stream of patients referred to the ER with non-urgent problems that could have been addressed with a dose of common sense,” he wrote. “The more cynical of us perceive that Telehealth programs are yet one more way that government can pretend to be doing something about health care without actually doing anything of significance.”

This is a particular issue for new parents, who need something of significance because we simply don’t know what to expect from our children’s health issues and we’re not getting the help we need from Telehealth.

Perhaps there needs to be specific phone lines for pediatric help, or perhaps they could use Skype to give the nurses more confidence in their assessments. All I know is that bringing a sick-but-not-in-danger kid into emergency is the last thing the hospital needs, and the next time I need healthcare help, I won’t bother wasting my time on the phone.

“His voice might change.” That’s what my wife Carrie told me: The surgery might make Emile’s voice change. I know his voice won’t stay this way forever, or even for long. Emile’s only three-and-a-half. But I love its exact current level of squeakiness. It’s a dumb concern, but this was was how I was dealing with the looming operation to cut out his adenoids and tonsils.

Its full dumbness became clear when I went to see E in the post-op recovery room on Wednesday morning, following the sound of his freaked-out wailing to a hospital bed where his tiny little body was coming out of the general anesthesia: agitated, disoriented, and in serious pain.

I barely noticed the blood from his mouth and nose staining my shirt. (We both wore Superman Ts to the hospital, though E now only had on his matching Superman undies beneath his yellow-striped hospital gown.) But I did notice how clutching my body as tight as he could manage didn’t slow down the wracking sobs, even with me singing his favourite Wizard of Oz songs, and I understood why my wife had agreed to let me go in this time, after she’d gone to comfort Emile following his first surgery last year.

And it would get a lot worse once we got home.

E’s first surgery involved the insertion of ear tubes, a means of reducing the painful pressure from fluid in his middle ear that wouldn’t drain, affecting his hearing and resulting in repeated infections. One of those caused a fever-induced febrile seizure in my arms. Carrie was away at the time, and his tiny 18-month-old body convulsed for what seemed like forever.

This new surgery is related to these earlier problems. It’s minor—or, rather, a routine one, since no such a thing as a “minor surgery” exists. It’s routine enough that Emile’s second cousin in Hawaii had it done just last week, and many Facebook friends told me they’d either had it done as kids or their own kids had gone through it. It also pales next to more serious surgeries, like the heart surgery performed on the baby of my wife’s high school friend.

But logic has little place when your little one is going under a knife. General anesthetic always carries the danger of not coming out of it, a risk that haunts no matter how infinitesimal it is these days. There’s also a full week of recovery—and this is where the hard part lies.

We actually discovered E’s adenoid issue by chance. Parents are paranoid by evolutionary design, and so we asked our doctor about a vertebra that appeared to be sticking out of his back more than the others. We were sent to Sick Kids for an x-ray and his back turned out to be totally fine. But the scan also found his adenoids were dangerously enlarged and might need to be removed.

Tonsils I knew about, but I’d never heard of their lymphatic cousins, adenoids. They are spongy tissue lumps comprising the baby/toddler immune system’s “first line of defence” against infections. They begin shrinking around age five and are basically undetectable by adulthood. But while there, they protect wee bairns by absorbing harmful bacteria and viruses—which, ironically, make them prone to getting infected themselves.

Located in the back of the nasal cavity, above the roof of the mouth, they’re un-examinable by regular means—which is why we only found them from the x-ray, despite Emile’s longstanding (and, in hindsight, directly related) health issues.

Adenoids can grow as big as a ping-pong ball and, when enlarged, can block the nose, causing drooling, snoring, and mouth-breathing as well as preventing ear drainage and causing chronic ear infections. These are all symptoms Emile has had to contend with almost his whole life. The adenoidectomy would also prevent potential problems, like “adenoid face,” a jaw deformation resulting from the nasal obstruction.

We tried using a nasal spray for a couple months, while we waited for our ENT appointment. But it made no difference and, eventually, our specialist recommended we remove the adenoid—and, while we were at it, the tonsils, too.

We prepped by buying lots of toys and treats like popsicles, freezies, and Jell-O. My day job has an amazing thing called family sick days, so I booked most of a week off to see him through recovery.

The surgery itself took about a half-hour, during which we stressed out in the children’s waiting room surrounded by cheerful decorations, happy toys, and another dad playing Super Mario on Wii. It was not a long time, but we don’t experience time in seconds so much as moments—and the length between the moment E was led away and the moment the doctor told us he was OK felt like an eternity.

We went home after four hours under observation in the hospital. E was sedated from the morphine and, whenever it wore off, he’d have a meltdown as the pain surged. Normally he feels no pain, not even flinching at doctor’s needles, but this was above and beyond. We had to force the medicine down and it was the only thing we’d gotten into him all day except for a few bites of Jell-O and small sips of water.

Overnight, it became a nightmare. I slept with him in the bed while my wife tried to get some rest on the couch, and E awoke almost every hour in pain. He refused to take his meds willingly so, at midnight and 4 a.m., I again had to hold him down while he screamed and writhed, just to get the morphine and Tylenol down his throat.

There was no way to get him hydrated in that state, which made his throat hurt more and, therefore, made him more adamant about not taking the medicine. It became such a downward spiral that, by morning, we nearly had to take him to Emerg to get an IV—until I was finally able to convince him that spending the day in hospital with a needle up his arm would be less preferable to sipping water on the couch in front of cartoons.

Eventually, I broke though, and when he faded out for a nap he slept for three hours. The rest of the day, night, and this morning have had ups and downs, and we’re not out of the woods yet. The fourth and fifth day are reportedly the worst as the scabs come off, and he still hasn’t had anything to eat but Jello-O, half a slice of lemon-meringue pie, and a bite of a Kinder egg. Oh, and his breath may soon start smelling like rotten meat while the flesh heals.

It’s been tough, a lot more so than we expected, and the fact that the surgery was elective makes it hard not to blame ourselves for putting Emile though it. But part of being a parent is looking long-term and realizing that, sometimes, you have to make decisions that are physically and emotionally painful, yet also the right ones.

We have few bad days left to come, but we also hope that the health issues that have forced us to spend an unbearable amount of time at the doctor’s and in hospital have finally been bought to an end.

Grocery shopping with the kids doesn’t stress me out anymore. Not usually, anyway. The three of us tend to hit the Loblaws at Portland and Queen for dinner supplies right after school, when things are quiet. But a couple of weekends ago we made a rare Sunday visit. We’d spent the afternoon dorking around at Alexandra Park, and then I realized I didn’t have anything to cook for dinner.

The second we topped the escalator, my six year-old boy, Myron, asked the question he always does at that moment: “Can I get a Yop?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be in the fruit section.”

Penny perked up. “Can I go with him?”

“Sure,” I said. And she headed off, too.

Whoa, I thought. Where did all these people come from? Was it always so crowded on Sunday afternoons? I picked up some mango lemonade and strawberries and headed over to the baguettes when Myron showed up, bottle of Yop in hand. “Where’s Pen?” I asked.

“Isn’t she with you?”

“What? Weren’t you guys together?”

“She took a different way from me,” he said.

My daughter is four. Only four. I moved to get out of the apple aisle but one of those big strollers was in my way. My path around it was blocked by someone who was also trying to sidestep the carriage.

Every adult face around me suggested a threat. All the paranoia of recent events struck me. Newtown, the Boston Marathon, the Via train derailment plot—lots of terrible random events have been happening lately, and until now I’d succeeded in avoiding it affecting my parenting. When I grew up in small-town Southwestern Ontario it was common for six-year-olds to ride their bikes to school, solo. Meanwhile, there are parents in my peer group who never let their nine-year-olds out of their sight. Overprotective? I think so. Anyway, I resist. I’ve been experimenting with letting the kids walk the half-dozen houses to the corner store, to buy bread. And I let them play by themselves in the alley. Their independence makes me proud.

And now panic was punishing me. I’d allowed my kids too much independence. I assessed every face around me for kidnapper potential.

“Bubs,” I said to my son. “There are two ways to get to the Yop and Penny might have taken either one. You go the way past the meats and I’ll go the way toward the checkout area. We’ll meet at the Yop. Okay?”

We headed off in separate directions. How did I ever think it was okay to set my daughter loose in such a crowded grocery store? What had she been wearing? Her pink skinny jeans from the Gap. Cereal aisle? Nope. Drinks? Nope. Pasta, baking, cleaning products, frozen foods? Fuck, no.

I arrived first at our meeting place. Myron arrived seconds later, solo. “Stay close, buddy,” I said.

Then I heard it: “Daddy?” A distant cry—but from where? Or was it just my imagination? With Myron’s hand in mine, we threaded and deked our way through the traffic. Face after face after face, none of them my daughter’s. A guy in a toque did a double-take as I rushed past.

Just off the dozen-items-or-less aisle, a woman was standing with her back towards us. She held the hand of a little blond girl. It was Penny. I exhaled. “Thank you,” I said, and the woman nodded and I kneeled down before my daughter and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “I called for you,” she said.

“I heard you—I was looking for you.”

“The lady said she would help me.”

“My brave little girl,” I said. “You did the right thing.”

I looked at both of them. “We have to stick together, guys, okay? We can’t separate from each other.”

Except, that’s wrong, isn’t it?

A good parent must look for opportunities to separate from his kids. In the weeks that have passed since my five minutes of Yop-induced panic, I’ve considered what lessons to learn from the experience. Next time I’ll assess how crowded the venue is before letting them go off alone. But I’m still looking for low-risk opportunities to let them wander. City kids are exposed to a lot of random danger—I can’t let that affect my parenting, can I?

Turn on your TV. Flip through the channels for a bit. Do you see a deficit of white folks? No, you do not. Canada may be a cultural mosaic and America a melting pot, but the boob tube is still pretty pure laine. And so it is rather rich that, this week, a brouhaha erupted over a since-revised job posting for CBC Kids’ show Patty and Mamma Yamma that was looking for a male co-host between the ages of 23 and 35 of “any race except Caucasian.”

Cue the bloggeruption, Twittersplosion, and, eventually, Fox News North’s self-declared cultural warrior Brian Lilley’s “No Whites Allowed” piece, in which the Sun TV host goes into ironic outrage over a job posting that wasn’t politically correct enough for him. (Showing surprising self-awareness, he admits to being pro-discrimination but can’t abide by the CBC doing it: “Why do they think they can get away with it?”)

A letter to the editor in the National Post swung even harder, griping that “leftists remain intent on legitimizing this form of discrimination, which many of them view as appropriate ‘payback time against whitey.’ The hypocrisy of such leftists, who vaunt themselves as valiant fighters against all forms of discrimination, is galling to say the least.” Meanwhile, the comments on the Post‘s original article ranged from “it’s time for a white civil rights movement” to “the most closed minded people are supposedly open minded progressives.”

And it’s not just right-wingers railing against the “state broadcaster.” NDP MP Andrew Cash, who actually represents my own riding, told QMI: “The job description from the casting company is completely unacceptable. The company has since removed the posting and apologized, which was the right thing to do.”

Meanwhile, the CBC backed away slowly, blaming “human error” on the part of their casting agency. The job posting on the Larissa Mair Casting and Associates site, as well as Craigslist, quickly had the offending line deleted.

But here’s the thing: As a parent, I think hiring a host who is any race but Caucasian is completely acceptable in this case.

Sure, the wording was indelicate, but the show already has a white female host (Patty Sullivan) and so they were seeking a minority male to provide the most possible diversity. (The titular Mamma Yamma, by the way, is a yam puppet who runs a produce stand in Kensington Market.) As the official letter the CBC sends out to casting agents (which was forwarded to the National Post) put it: “At CBC, inclusion and diversity is a priority. This means reflecting Canada and its regions as well as the country’s multicultural and multiracial nature.” It also stresses that a concerted effort be “to cast actors who reflect Canada’s diversity.”

It’s an admirable effort, so why not be honest? Critics would have presumably preferred a colour-blind casting call that wastes the time of everyone that didn’t fit the bill of what the show was actually looking for. Kinda like all the non-specific auditions where white actors are hired regardless—and for the same “representative” reasons. Except in those cases, the goal is to represent most viewers rather the most types of viewers. This is a huge difference, especially when it comes to children’s programming.

I’m fortunate enough to be raising my three-year-old Emile in one of the most diverse ridings in the country, in one of the most diverse cities in the world. That cultural (if not gender) diversity is also nicely reflected in the staff of his daycare. To him, it’s just normal.

But a lot of people, including myself when I was a kid, live in less-mixed neighbourhoods. As such, television has a huge socializing influence on what we deem normal, and minorities are inarguably under-represented across the dial. Yes, even in kids shows.

It may seem like children’s television programming would be an oasis of cultural diversity because the most famous kids show, Sesame Street, pioneered interracial and multicultural casts way back in 1969. But in 2010, “A National Study on Children’s Television Programming in Canada” found that, of the 563 shows it analyzed, 78 per cent of the “human-type characters” were identified as European white, eight per cent were black, six per cent were Asian, five per cent were Aboriginal, two per cent were Latino and one per cent were Middle Eastern. On top of that, 48 per cent interacted only with people of the same race or culture, and only 42 per cent of children’s shows had any visible minorities at all.

Every non-white face on a kids show not only provides another entry point of identification for a wider range of young viewers, it also helps the white-majority kids indentify with those who doesn’t look like them. My son loves Yo Gabba Gabba and its black host DJ Lance Rock. The show quite rightly never draws any attention to race, but it makes a difference because Emile’s positive feelings about DJ Lance are internalized and will help make him a more open-minded person as he grows up.

As an Australian government fact sheet on diversity (albeit in reference to daycare) put it, “by six months of age, children are already noticing similarities and differences in people. If they form positive attitudes towards differences, they are more likely to grow up appreciating diversity as a normal part of their lives.”

Fear comes from the unknown, and the more one is used to seeing and being around people from other races and cultures, the less one might fear and therefore be prejudiced against them. We can’t, and shouldn’t, control whom people associate with—but one thing we can and should control is who they see represented on children’s television.

Events selected by Bunchland

1. Go fly a kite! Learn everything there is to know about these airborne masterpieces and participate in a breezy, wind-themed hike.
May 4–5. Kortright Centre for Conservation, 9550 Pine Valley Dr., 905-832-2289. Free with admission.

2. Who’s the man behind the mask? Kids can create a new persona at the Power Kids mask-making workshop for thespians eight and up.
May 5. Power Plant, 231 Queens Quay W., 416-973-4949, thepowerplant.org. Call to register. Free.

3. Andiamo al cinema! TIFF offers screenings of kid-friendly films as part of its Italian Contemporary Film Festival. Bonus: subtitles are included.
May 7–11. TIFF Bell Lightbox, 350 King St. W., 416-599-8433, tiff.net. $12.

4. Let the songs of lovestruck male toads serenade you during the Toronto Zoo’s Spring Toad Festival—a celebration of wetland wildlife.
May 4–5. Toronto Zoo, 361A Old Finch Ave., 416-392-5999, torontozoo.com. $11–$20.

5. Give two very green thumbs up at the Gardiner Museum’s flower pot–decorating workshop.
May 5. Gardiner Museum, 111 Queen’s Park, 416-586-8080. $5.

6. The Forest of Reading Festival of Trees will hit the Harbourfront Centre for two packed days of workshops, author signings, and more.
May 15–16. Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay W., 416-973-4000. $15.

7. What’s up, doc? Bugs Bunny at the Symphony, that’s what. Screenings of classic Looney Tunes films are accompanied by the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony as part of this lighthearted live performance.
May 18. Sony Centre for the Performing Arts, 1 Front St. E., 855-872-7669. $45–$78.

8. A variety stage packed with daring performers guarantees big fun under the big top at this month’s Sweet Variety of Circus showcase.
May 18–20. Harbourfront Centre, 235 Queens Quay W., 416-973-4000. Free.

9. Dust off those eye patches and tiaras for a fairytale weekend of royalty lessons for aspiring princes and princesses, a treasure hunt, survival games, and more.
May 18–20. Black Creek Pioneer Village, 1000 Murray Ross Pkwy., 416-736-1733. $22–$25.

10. Looking for a bargain? Head to the East York Mom to Mom Sale for gently used kids and baby stuff.
May 25. Royal Canadian Legion, Todmorden Branch, 1083 Pape Ave., 416-425-3070. $2.

11. Experience the tastes and sounds of cultures from 72 countries at Carassauga, Mississauga’s annual multicultural festival.
May 24–26. Hershey Centre, 5600 Rose Cherry Pl., Mississauga, 905-615-3010. $10–$12.

Just in time to celebrate the current international Immunization Awareness Week, UNICEF released their Innocenti Report Card 11 earlier this month, cataloguing how kids are doing in rich countries. Canada did not do very well.

Much of the media attention was on the news that Canada claims world-champion pothead status with 28 per cent of our young people smoking up. But elsewhere the results were less laughable.

We ranked 15 out of 29 countries in material well-being, 14th in educational well-being, and 16th in behaviour and risks. But over in health and safety, our kids ranked 27th—ahead of only Latvia and Romania—due to what CP described as “stunningly low” childhood immunization rates.

In fact, at a rate of 84 per cent for immunized children, we are ahead of only Austria on the list. Oh, and 95 per cent is the number “required to protect the community from resurgences of deadly and debilitating infectious disease.”

That CP story tried to explain this number away by pointing out data holes due to a lack of either a federal or comprehensive provincial immunization registries. But while that may be true, a too-large number are no doubt also due to parents purposefully not vaccinating their kids. And, alongside the resurgence of an anti-vaccination movement, we’re also seeing things like last year’s whooping-cough outbreak that spread across Canada, infecting over 2,000 and killing an infant.

As Andre Picard noted at the time in the Globe & Mail, “Well-meaning parents are shunning vaccination in small but significant numbers because of imaginary fears largely concocted by quacks and charlatans. In doing so, they are giving almost-forgotten diseases the ability to resurface and cause real harm.”

The anti-immunization movement has been mobilizing since the 1800s—or, essentially, since the development of vaccines themselves—but the most famous of anti-vax advocates is 1990s-era Playboy Playmate Jenny McCarthy, an unconscionable “activist” trying to hawk books by claiming vaccinations caused her son’s autism despite all scientific evidence to the contrary.

As recently as two years ago, Time magazine reported a study that found 24 per cent of parents “place ‘some trust’ in information provided by celebrities such as McCarthy about the safety of vaccines.”  Twenty-four per cent.

And the movement has hardly died down since. Just last month, anti-vax activists staged a “Vaccine Summit” in Vancouver, home to the Vaccine Resistance Movement, at Simon Fraser University under the banner: “the only shot you need is the truth.”

If that sounds like something Alex Jones might say, well, you’d be on the nose. When not claiming terror attacks and mass shootings like Boston and Sandy Hook are government-sanctioned “false flags,” conspiracy theorist du jour Jones devotes a lot of his radio show and website, Infowars.com, to topics like “Secret Government Documents Reveal Vaccines to be a Total Hoax,” “Vaccine Victory: Widespread Resistance from Parents to HPV Jab for Daughters Shows Truth is Spreading” and “Infowars Confronts Bill Gates On Eugenics Vaccine Program.”

But you can’t just dismiss the anti-vax movement, because they are causing real harm. There’s currently a measles epidemic in Wales, with cases of the deadly disease rising past 800, including one death last week, while outbreaks have been occurring across England, which now has nearly 600 cases. Much of the blame can be placed on the shoulders of Andrew Wakefield, the defrocked doctor (he lost his medical license in 2010) whose thoroughly debunked 1998 study claiming a link between vaccinations and autism kicked off the current anti-vax craze. (And yet the U.K. still claims over 90 per cent immunization compared to Canada’s 84 per cent.)

And then there’s Dr. Bob Sears, the son of attachment-parenting guru Dr. Bill Sears. Among his tomes for sale is The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child, in which he claims to have sussed out the secret to keeping your child safe that nobody else has come up with. On his website, Sears writes, “Should you vaccinate your child? This seems to be the question of the decade for many parents. It used to be ‘How can I get my baby to sleep through the night?’ or ‘How can I get my toddler to eat better?’ But now almost all parents have worries about vaccines.”

Worries created by profiteers like him, but I digress. His solution is an alternative schedule of delaying vaccines, skipping some, and relying on “herd immunity,” which basically means that if your child is surrounded by other vaccinated kids, then he or she will be safe from disease regardless of their own immunizations. His solution has also been thoroughly deconstructed as misinformation in the medical journal Pediatrics. (More recently, another study discredited the theory that multiple immunizations on the same day were a danger.)

Now here’s the thing about being a parent. It is scary. You are in charge of a tiny little life and you have no idea what you’re doing. And so the parent-industrial complex has risen up to profit off these fears. But in the case of vaccinations, they’ve dovetailed with the thriving conspiracy-theory movement online as well as the rise of “alternative” parenting philosophies to create a supposed clear and present danger.

We have responsibilities as parents, both to our children and the other children they spend time with at daycare, school or other gathering places to ensure their safety. And that includes getting them properly immunized. There’s a desire on the part of many modern parents to dismiss conventional wisdom, but you simply don’t know more than your doctor or the medical establishment, and neither do the authors and bloggers trying to convince you otherwise. Your family and friends, don’t either, no matter how how many times they post anti-vax status updates or tweets. (A recent study found the number-one influencer for “vaccine-hesitant” parents was their social networks, online and off, but just because the internet is full of health “information,” doesn’t mean you should be crowd-sourcing your decisions based on the theories spouted by non-medical practitioners.)

Researching this column sucked me into an anti-vax vortex of bloggers and commenters absolutely convinced that science is wrong, and that instinct, pseudoscience, and anecdotal “evidence” is the real truth. In other aspects of parenting, this sort of alternative thinking only impacts the family at hand, but immunization is not one of them. So it’s nobody’s business how long someone like, say, actor and attachment-parenting author Mayim Biyalik chooses to co-sleep or breastfeed, but her decision to be a “non-vaccinating family” puts others in harm’s way. Herd immunity is intended to protect those who can’t be vaccinated, like babies, people on chemo, or those with immunodeficincies. Every healthy unvaccinated child weakens that herd immunity and threatens lives with vaccine-preventable diseases.

There are also risks, however limited and rare, to getting vaccines, but do you really want to regress to a time when smallpox and polio roamed the Earth and thinned that herd? No matter how well-meaning you may be as a parent, it is selfish to risk your little ones’ lives, much less those of other parents who have no say and far too much to lose.

The next time your preschooler grabs your iPad out of your hands, think about how you want him or her to interact with technology in five years’ time—is it as a user or a maker?

Growing up wired doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a child will end up a computer whiz. As Jesse Brown recently pointed out in Maclean’s, we’re in danger of raising “the most technologically illiterate generation of computer-using kids yet.”

Elementary schools don’t have coding written into their curricula, but there’s been an explosion of resources in the community to fill the gap. Summer courses like children’s tech workshop icamp (416 Moore Ave., 416-486-7144) and Real Programming 4 Kids (255 Glenlake Ave., 877-307-3456) give children as young as seven an intro to the e-language.

Laura Plant runs Girls Learning Code, a Toronto-based organization that specializes in techie camps and workshops for “girls who want to change the world.” She says, “We’re all about kids empowering themselves and being creators—becoming builders, not just consumers, of technology.” Web design and robotics may seem like lofty concepts for young’uns, but Plant says a tech-savvy kid is a confident one. “When you have these skills, it can help you accomplish your goals—whatever they might be.”

Bunch runs a daily online magazine reporting on the best art and culture for urban families.

Quebec has given us many a curious cultural institution, from Cirque du Soleil to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And now, my three-year-old son Emile’s current favourite cartoon Toopy and Binoo is right up there.

I used to not dig Toopy and Binoo. The fantastical series about a giant chatty rat and his silent feline stuffie (and the plush cat’s own stuffie, Patchy Patch) is barely animated, the voices are grating even by kid’s show standards, and the theme song just repeats the two title characters’ names over and over. (Damnit, now it’s in my head again.)

But Emile loves it—it’s recently surpassed Yo Gabba Gabba and My Little Pony in his affections—and so we tune in. The more I watch it, the more I realize what a wonderfully transgressive show it is. Toopy and Binoo simply refuses to be confined to the gender roles we see so often in children’s entertainment, a subculture that so often puts up an insurmountable barrier between girls and boys.

It’s presumed that Toopy and Binoo are male, but mostly they’re imaginative and therefore just as likely to be wearing a royal gown and lipstick while kissing frogs in search of a prince, or looking like a mermaid as they are adorned in a suit of armour or superhero costume.

“The fact that it came out of Montreal is no surprise at all. Many, many progressive things in the arts and dance and theatre have come out of there,” says Patti Caplette, the artistic director of Toopy and Binoo and the Marshmallow Moon, a touring theatrical production which touches down in Toronto on April 27. “What a freeing experience it is. Toopy can dress up and be the princess. And why not? There are no stereotypes in it all. They break every conceivable concept of male-female gender [stereotypes]. I love that about it.”

So do we. Our son himself is occasionally found in a fairy princess dress when we pick him up from daycare, and other times he’s wearing a Superman cape or swinging a pretend pirate sword. But already, the other kids are starting to enforce the differences between boys and girls. Not that there aren’t differences, of course, but when it comes to dress-up or any other form of pretend play, there’s no reason to limit imagination. Which is why it’s so great that Toopy and Binoo pays no attention to gender roles at all.

This, of course, has angered plenty of folks online (not that it’s hard to find something that angers folks online) who are upset that these cartoon animals are cross-dressers. Some have even accused the show of being “homosexual mind control.” I, of course, tend to agree with the commenter who sagely noted it’s “obviously meant for children, not their unfortunately ignorant parents.”

The franchise is based on a series of books, Toopie et Binou, by award-winning French-Canadian author Dominique Jolin, and it was subsequently turned into an animated series for toddler-targeted cable network Treehouse (it also airs on PBS in the US).

“There’s so much out there that’s just cookie-cutter animation and storylines, and Toopy and Binoo is totally off the wall. It’s outrageous, it pushes our imagination and it chucks it over the edge,” Caplette says. “Toopy thinks he’s fabulous, and [for kids] testing the world out for the first time, that kind of confidence is quite remarkable.”

The cartoon was actually quite short-lived, airing only in 2005 and 2006. Those two seasons have since been rerun indefinitely. But this month, Treehouse launched a new live-action version, Toopy and Binoo Vroom Vroom Zoom, which mixes puppetry with animated sets and props. Emile was initially put off by the puppets—kids are not big fans of change—but he gave it a shot and was quickly enamoured. (He even decided that my wife and I should dress as the rat and cat for Halloween, while he dresses up as their flying bed…and no, we can’t ride the flying bed to go trick-or-treating because “it’s just a costume, Daddy!”)

The live-action TV show also offers a good template for the theatrical production. Expect audience favourites like the black and white sheep, the blues cats, love-struck dragons, Mrs. Octopus, shooting star, and the titular marshmallow moon as Toopy goes searching for the song in his heart, only to discover, Wizard of Oz style, that it’s been there all along.

But the fact that both TV series are so rooted in conflict-free flights of fancy made me wonder how Caplette would be able to pull this all off onstage.

“That was a big challenge,” she admits. “I had to think of how theatrically I was going to be able to take the audiences to these places simply. I chose to use giant projection screens. In Toopy’s bedroom there’s the famous door that sits in mid-air—he can walk through that door and be in another world.”

And that’s precisely why kids love it so much. Imagination seems theoretical until you witness its development in a toddler, and so Toopy and Binoo, be they animations, puppets, or an amalgam, offer an endorsement of their pretend play, and an encouragement to follow along with wherever it may lead—and whatever it may be wearing.

Toopy and Binoo and the Marshmallow Moon visits the Sony Centre (1 Front Street East) on April 27 at 10 a.m., 1 p.m., and 4 p.m. Toopy and Binoo Vroom Vroom Zoom airs Saturdays at 7 p.m. on Treehouse.

I pulled the car up in front of our house and went around to the trunk, where the grocery bags sat. My six-year-old son, Myron, accepted one with milk and orange juice in it, and staggered off toward the kitchen. Next, I went to hand a lighter bag to my four-year-old daughter, Penny.

“Why do I have to carry a bag?” she asked, looking at it like it was full of garbage.

“Because you’re a member of this family, and you have to contribute when there’s work to be done.”

“I don’t want to be a Shulgan,” she said, glaring at me.

“Who do you want to be?”

“I want to be a princess.”

“Princesses have to do work, too,” I said, and set the bag down in front of her.

My daughter is trying on roles. The default lately seems to be princess. Last week, she received two gifts: one from me, one from my mother. I bought her a hockey stick so that she could play with her brother and I in the alley next to our house. My mother got her a pair of high heels. Which one do you think excited her more?

My mom had only the best of intentions when she purchased the heels. Penny has been asking for them for months. But now, she prefers to wear heels instead of doing fun things, like going on bike rides or playing ball in the alley. Watching her totter around the house in two-inch-high white sandals made me melancholy.

For the first time, she’s confronting a paradox that exists around femininity—what expands you, constricts you. That, I realized, was why I’ve come to hate my daughter’s high heels. Something she regards as a key artifact to her maturing—the heels—prevents her from doing certain things, like playing a wall-bounce game, or riding our bikes to school.

I don’t blame my mother for the purchase. The heels have only set in motion something I hoped my daughter would resist. She seems to be gravitating toward some of the more constrictive elements of femininity. “Princesses don’t just sit around looking pretty,” I told her as I walked with her to school one morning. Then I cited as examples some of her key female role models: my girlfriend, Chantel, and Penny’s mom, Natalie. “Channie’s a princess, isn’t she? And she runs, and she swims, and she plays ball with Myron. And mom’s a princess, isn’t she? And she does yoga and watches football games.”

On Thursday, Chantel and I took the kids to Trinity-Bellwoods Park for some soccer. Except Penny didn’t want to play. Chantel and Myron and I set up the goals. “Come on over,” I yelled to Penny, who was wandering off toward the dog bowl.

Then I jogged over to her. “I don’t want to play soccer,” she said. “I want to play in the soft grass.”

“Pen, why don’t we play soccer first, and then we can all go play in the soft grass?” I asked. “You know, princesses who play sports have more fun than princesses who don’t play sports,” I said. “You have to have something you feel good about rather than just looking good.”

I bargained with her. Five goals. That’s how many she had to get before she could go off by herself. We played three on one. Myron, Chantel, and Penny versus me. I went into slapstick goalie mode. Anytime Pen kicked the ball remotely goalward I slipped, tripped, fell down, or fell over. Her first goal astounded her. She just stood there, like she didn’t believe it happened. The next goal, though—that one she celebrated. And the third one she marked with some trash talking. “Daddy,” she said. “You’re not a very good goalie.”

Five goals took about five minutes. During our Sunday dinner run-through of the week’s high points, I mentioned the five goals Penny scored as one of my favourite moments from the previous seven days. The following morning—I asked Penny whether she wanted to go and play soccer one day after school.

“Sure,” she said. “One day.”

It’s a start.