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Sep

25

Please! Let me pay $10 for something I can do with Simon Says


I read about Get Kids Moving in this morning’s dBusiness News email. My first reaction was, hmm – I’ve had a board game in our house for over seven years now called Footloose (no, it’s not based on the movie or anything within six degrees of Kevin Bacon) that does the same thing. And then there’s always putting on Raffi’s Shake Your Sillies Out.

But I wanted to squelch my snarkiness because, really, here’s a local Cleveland mother doing some marketing in regard to a problem we hear about all the time – children’s inertia.

Aside: This is where I editorialize my editorializing to say that children’s inertia isn’t some amorphous problem of a child’s – it’s the parents’ or guardians’ problem, as in, they may be too inert. I always wonder if these solutions address that aspect (and some do in fact).

On the other hand, I’m really a pisher when it comes to people turning an idea that you can do at home with your own cheap stuff into something for which they charge five to tens time more (think fancy flashcards for addition and subtraction – do them on index cards, people, or think cutesy paper lunch bags with nice pictures and sweet words on them – they aren’t big enough, you can’t put a Blue Ice in there and I can draw stick figures that say, I love you, just as well, besides which I did in fact used to handdraw a maze every day for my oldest son and put it in his lunchbag, and I recycled my computer paper no less).

I know, I know – people are short on time, these things send a lovely message, they make a kid feel special bla bla bla. I don’t have all those letters after my name for nothing – I know what the upsides are. And I still think, even when I’m lazy myself, that in times of economic hardship, we should be buying plain brown bags and using some crayons to brighten the day.

Whatever.

Okay, so…

Sigh.

I didn’t want to pick apart the idea, even though in my mind, I kind of already had.

I decided to google the folks involved.

Turns out they are quite the pair and I’m betting someone in the NEO blogosphere must know them because the husband and wife (well, it seems like husband and wife but I suppose it could be brother and sister, dad and daughter – you get the idea) both work with the Goebel Group, described as an entity that does a lot with search.

Anyway – here’s the Get Kids Moving site, here’s the possible spouse’s software company, which appears to be very successful and for which the Get Kids Moving founder appears to work.

I hope kids do get moving, with or without the Exercards. If that’s what it takes, so be it.

Meanwhile, I might cheap out even further and just tape Footloose the movie the next time it’s on and make my kids dance to it. That’s sure to keep us moving.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 7:53 pm September 25th, 2006 in Politics 

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