The old wives tale has some truth behind it.
Mom's diet may play role in whether baby is boy or girl
Having a hearty appetite, eating potassium-rich foods including bananas, and not skipping breakfast all seemed to raise the odds of having a boy.
What are we teaching young people about sex?
Too many parents have abdicated their roles as mentors to the young because their own experience has been painful. They don't have the fortitude to counter the toxic societal message that casual sex is free, fun and only recreation.
Janice Shaw Crouse gives us some Straight Talk About Casual Sex
We cannot expect young people to act responsibly when adults - whose thinking is sometimes clouded by their rationalization of their own hurtful and toxic sexual experimentation - are irresponsible by not providing the best possible information to encourage self-discipline and self-control, which are the surest keys to young peoples' long-term well-being.
Her truths
1. Casual sex impairs the ability to establish a lasting emotional bond.
2. Casual sex leaves young people alone and lonely.
3. The "sexual revolution" has produced dramatic increases in sexually transmitted diseases.
She has the facts behind them.
Now at your local drug store for only $29.99
At the very least, the kits have the potential to complicate the lives of the people who use them, legal experts cautioned.
“We all need to take a step back and realize that this is different than many tests that you take,” said R. Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “This is a life-changing moment.”
From instapundit Glenn Reynolds and his instawife, Dr. Helen Smith comes a wonderful podcast on capturing your child's passion and allow them to make money by being entrepreneurial.
The Glenn and Helen Show: Troy Dunn on Raising Kids to be Rich.
Troy Dunn's book is
"Young Bucks: How to Raise a Future Millionaire" (Troy Dunn)
Tom Hodgkinson has found that Idle parenting means happy children
To the busy modern parent, this idea seems counter-intuitive. Aren't we always told to do more, not less? All parents have a nagging sense that somehow we are doing it all wrong and that more work needs to be done. But the problem is that we put too much work into parenting, not too little. By interfering a lot, we are not letting children grow up and learn themselves. The child who has been overprotected will not know how to look after himself. We are too much in children's faces. We need to retreat. Let them live.
Welcome to the school of inactive parenting. It's a win-win situation: less work for you and better for the child, both in terms of enjoying everyday life and also for self-reliance and independence.
The Manifesto of the idle parent
We reject the idea that parenting requires hard work
We pledge to leave our children alone
That should mean that they leave us alone, too
We reject the rampant consumerism that invades children from the moment they are born
We read them poetry and fantastic stories without morals
We drink alcohol without guilt
We reject the inner Puritan
We fill the house with music and laughter
We don't waste money on family days out and holidays
We lie in bed for as long as possible
We try not to interfere
We push them into the garden and shut the door so that we can clean the house
We both work as little as possible, particularly when the kids are small
Time is more important than money
Happy mess is better than miserable tidiness
Down with school
We fill the house with music and merriment
Jonathan Clements who writes the "Getting Going" column in the Wall St Journal has some fine advice for those who are contemplating a divorce.
Five tips on how to divorce the right way
Avoid the legal arms race because it will hurt both of you. As you negotiate a settlement, every dollar of legal costs incurred likely means 50 cents out of your pocket. Trust me: There are cheaper ways to work through your anger.
Having the ex-spouse around the corner might seem uncomfortably close. But if you have children, it probably means you will see less of your former spouse. There are no awkward drop-offs and pickups. Instead, the kids just walk back and forth.
Maintain a reservoir of goodwill, because you'll need it. It will be your week with the kids, your boss will have other plans -- and you may need your ex-spouse to bail you out.
If your ex ends up with a little more money in the divorce or goes on to do well financially, don't let it eat away at you. In all likelihood, your children will be the ultimate beneficiaries.
Think of your relationship with your ex-spouse as a business relationship. Forget the bad blood. Ignore stuff that isn't your business. Instead, focus on the task at hand, which is raising the children.
ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won’t tell you it’s a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she’ll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child).
To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family.
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My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go
Marry Him in the March Atlantic.
The twins that saved their mother's life by kicking loose a tumor while still in the womb.
Unknown to her, Mrs Stepney, 35, had developed cervical cancer. Her unborn twins' constant kicking in the womb actually managed to dislodge the tumour.
It was only when Mrs Stepney was taken to hospital with a suspected miscarriage that doctors realised she had cancer.
They told her the babies had saved her life. Without them, the cancer may not have been discovered until it was too late.
Despite the doctors' advice to terminate the pregnancy so she could have a hysterectomy and start chemotherapy, Mrs. Stepney said
I owe my life to my girls, and that's why I could have never agreed with a termination."
Instead, she waited for her lifesaving treatment until they had been born.
Now the proud mother of year-old girls Alice and Harriet, Mrs Stepney has been given the all-clear.
This is self-evident; still, it's always nice when scientific research proves that Kids Learn More When Mom is Listening.
The researchers found that explaining the answer to themselves and to their moms improved the children's ability to solve similar problems later, and that explaining the answer to their moms helped them solve more difficult problems.
"We saw that this simple act of listening by mom made a difference in the quality of the child's explanations and how well they could solve more difficult problems later on," Rittle-Johnson said.
The researchers also found that children experience the benefit of explaining a solution at an earlier age than previously thought..."We found that even 4-year-olds can use explanation to help them learn and to apply what they've learned to other tasks."
You don't really understand anything until you can explain it or teach it to someone else. That's why having a mom who listens is so important to a child's development.
A Deep Divide: Digital Kids, Analog Parents
The kid knows no boundaries. But neither does the adult. The high school senior is so lost in a hyper-public, YouTube world that he thinks nothing of forwarding a private phone call to the entire planet. The wife of the Fairfax County public school administrator the kid called at home is understandably miffed about the invasion into her private sphere, yet she returns fire with a shockingly disproportionate blast of rage.
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It used to be you could have an inappropriate or rude conversation with someone and it would stay private," says Ron McClain, head of the Parkmont School in the District and a parent of teenagers in the Montgomery County schools. "There's a much fuzzier line between public and private now. This is a case where the technology has outpaced our ability to cope with its effects. As parents, we're way behind."
On the 35th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Los Angeles Times finds that the antiabortion cause stirs a new generation.
The crowds are getting younger and younger.
Pew Research Center polls dating back a decade show that 18-29 year-olds are consistently more likely than the general population to favor strict limits on abortion.
One student said, "Abortion feels more personal to us." Another responded, " I feel like we're all survivors of abortion. I look at my friends and I wonder, 'Where are your siblings?' "
It's always a treat to read Caitlin Flanagan piece and this month's piece in the Atlantic demonstrates why.
A Woman's Place, on Katie Couric's long day's journey into evening or why the Today show is more important than any nightly news program.
I watched them faithfully—although watch, I realize, is the wrong verb where this phenomenally successful program is concerned; anyone who fails to grasp this fact will never understand why the Today show will survive the death of nightly news, the death of the newspaper, and even the collapse of television as a major player in the media world. The Today show, like life itself, unfolds while you’re doing other things.
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The Today show creates a bond with its overwhelmingly female viewers because so many of them watch it, as I did, during one of the most psychologically complex and lonely—and most emotionally fulfilling—times of their lives: their tenure as mothers to small children.
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It is the loneliness of at-home motherhood—the loneliness for other adults, for the adult way of life, for the work clothes and schedules and employment itself—that makes the hosts of the Today show crucial. When you turn on the program, there they are: your friends. You half-listen to them, the way you half-listen to your children playing on the floor in the next room, and together the two worlds make up the whole of your enterprise: theory and practice. The host discusses shoes that are supposed to help toddlers walk more steadily, and you turn to your own baby and wonder if you ought to buy him a pair. ....
When it is on, the television screen is no longer a barrier separating real life from TV land; the television screen is a window into another room of the house, the one where the grown-ups are.
This is a wonderful story. Doctors gave up my 20oz baby for dead...but I saved her life with a cuddle.
She said: "I didn't want her to die being cold. So I lifted her out of her blanket and put her against my skin to warm her up. Her feet were so cold.
"It was the only cuddle I was going to have with her, so I wanted to remember the moment." Then something remarkable happened. The warmth of her mother's skin kickstarted Rachael's heart into beating properly, which allowed her to take little breaths of her own.
Miss Isbister said: "We couldn't believe it - and neither could the doctors. She let out a tiny cry.
Sprint now offers a Family Locator service that for $9.99 a month that lets parents know just where their child is so long as the cell phone is on.
For Parents, a service that can offer peace of mind.
Verizon has a service called Chaperone that allows parents to set boundaries and if a child steps out of the approved zone, an alert is sent to the parents.
I find this troubling but I can understand why some parents would want it.
More than 80% of autistic children with a fever show some improvements in behavior and 40% had dramatic improvements.
Fever can unlock autism's grip
The change involved things like longer concentration spans, more talking, improved eye contact and better overall relations with adults and other children.
Zimmerman's team said the fever effect had been noted anecdotally in the past by parents and doctors.
Consider the latest news out of Chicago. Are we going through the Great Relearning**, Part 2?
Rickets returns as kids' bones weaker.
Rickets is a softening of the bones in children potentially leading to fractures and deformity.
Usually a disease seen only in developing countries, in most cases it can be easily cured with milk, sunshine and exercise. In the absence of vitamin D, either from sunshine or from supplements, calcium can not be absorbed by the body.
But cases of full-blown rickets are just the red flag: Bone specialists say possibly millions of seemingly healthy children aren't building as much strong bone as they should, a gap that may leave them more vulnerable to bone-cracking osteoporosis later.
''This potentially is a time-bomb,'' says Dr. Laura Tosi of Children's National Medical Center in Washington.
That means parents have to insist that their kids drink their fortified milk, turn off the TV or computer and go outside and play.
Otherwise, they will grow up fat, with bowed legs, frequent fractures, deformed chests or curved spines, like this poor 2-year-old with rickets. 
***The Great Relearning comes from a brilliant essay by Tom Wolfe who observed that many social problems are the result of a large-scale rejection of well-established principles that were generally accepted by everyone until the 1960s.
In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the psychedelic movement. At the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? ... The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero... And now , in 1968, they were relearning... the laws of hygiene... by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
They love their own libraries, read philosophy, history and fiction and when they need a great manager, the call goes out, "Get me poets".
CEO Libraries Reveal Keys to Success
If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,” suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.
Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries. “I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction,
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Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians, many of whom she translated, and kept one book under lock and key in her bedroom, in a French translation she alone of her court could read: Machiavelli’s treatise on how to overthrow republics, “The Prince.” Churchill retreated to his library to heal his wounds after being voted out of power in 1945 — and after reading for six years came back to power.
The National Endowment of the Arts reports that reading is declining especially for young Americans and so are their test scores in data said to be "simple, consistent and alarming".
The number of books at home correlates with academic achievement which makes sense to me.
students who lived in homes with more than 100 books but whose parents only completed high school scored higher on math tests than those students whose parents held college degrees (and were therefore likely to earn higher incomes) but who lived in homes with fewer than 10 books.
Home libraries are predictors of success.
Print by Jessie Wilcox-Smith
My mother used to counsel younger mothers nervous with a rambunctious child, 'Don't worry, they'll grow out of it."
Apparently that's the case with most kids with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
ADHD Kids Can Get Better.
researchers found that some areas in the ADHD brain — particularly those involved in thinking, attention and planning — matured an average of three years later than "healthy" brains, but otherwise followed normal patterns of development.
With data from 24 colleges and universities, the National Survey of Student Engagement releases a study that gives hovering college parents extra credit.
"Compared with their counterparts, children of helicopter parents were more satisfied with every aspect of their college experience, gained more in such areas as writing and critical thinking, and were more likely to talk with faculty and peers about substantive topics," said survey director George D. Kuh, an Indiana University professor.
The study found no evidence that helicopter parenting produces better grades. In fact, students with very-involved parents had lower grades than those whose parents were not so involved, but the authors suggest that "perhaps the reason some parents intervened was to support a student who was having academic difficulties."
Why shouldn't parents stay engaged with their children?
Keeping children primarily oriented towards their parents as "their guide for discovering their identity, morals and virtues" keeps them
attached to more mature and civilized principles and values. They still can attach to peers, but not as a primary source of orientation.
Jennifer F. posts on The Lost Children and quotes the authors Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate
As children grow, they have an increasing need to orient: to have a sense of who they are, of what is real, why things happen, what is good, what things mean. To fail to orient is to...be lost psychologically -- a state our brains our programmed to do almost anything to avoid. [...]
What children fear more than anything, including physical harm, is getting lost. To them, being lost means losing contact with their compass point. Orienting voids, situations where we find nothing or no one to orient by, are absolutely intolerable to the human brain.
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Peer bonds have come to replace relationships with adults as children's primary sources of orientation...Children have become the dominant influence on one another's development.
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In the separate tribe many of our children have joined, the transmission of values and culture flows horizontally, from one unlearned and immature person to another. This process...is eroding one of the underpinnings of civilized social activity. [...]
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No wonder, then, that "cool" is the governing ethic in peer culture, the ultimate virtue...It connotates an air of invulnerability. Where peer orientation is intense, there is no sign of vulnerability in the talk, in the walk, in the dress, or in the attitudes. [...]
Peer-oriented kids will do anything to avoid the human feelings of aloneness, suffering, and pain, and to escape feeling hurt, exposed, alarmed, insecure, inadequate, or self-conscious. The older and more peer-oriented the kids, the more drugs seem to be an inherent part of their lifestyle. Peer orientation creates an appetite for anything that would reduce vulnerability. Drugs are emotional painkillers.
Only 5% of high school seniors sleep 8 hours a night. Half of adolescents get less than seven.
Overstimulated, overscheduled kids are getting at least an hour’s less sleep than they need, a deficiency that, new research reveals, has the power to set their cognitive abilities back years.
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Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure the impact of this single lost hour. Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.
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Perhaps most fascinating, the emotional context of a memory affects where it gets processed. Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories get processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.
It seems as though lack of sleep makes adolescents stupider, fatter and gloomier.
One small glass of wine a day is okay for pregnant women and safe for the fetus says the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in the U.K.
Safer to avoid wine in the first three months of a pregnancy. That's when the brain and nervous system are developing.
When a grown child cuts off communication with a parent, the parent(s) feel shame, disillusion and hurt. Even if they have done nothing wrong, Even if their other children turned out fine.
Joshua Coleman's new book, When Parents Hurt, can help such parents cope and carry on.
His website is here - whenparentshurt.com - along with excerpts from the first chapter
Dear Mom,
I have decided that I don’t want to have any contact with you ever again. Please don’t write or call me anymore. I can’t stop thinking about all of the ways that you were never there for me when I was growing up. Whenever I see or talk to you, I just end up feeling depressed, angry, and upset for weeks afterwards. It’s just not worth it to me and I need to get on with my life. Please respect my wishes and don’t contact me again.
Letter from Clarice, 23 to her mother, Fiona, 48
Pediatricians in Massachusetts, following guidelines issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics, are grilling children about their parents' habits, apparently as a matter of course.
Doc, what's up with snooping?
The paranoia over parents is so strong that the AAP encourages doctors to ignore “legal barriers and deference to parental involvement” and shake the children down for all the inside information they can get.
And that information doesn’t stay with the doctor, either.
Nobody who's stood between a toddler and the last cookie should still harbor a belief in the inherent virtue of mankind. An afternoon at the playground is apt to make one toss out the idealist Rousseau ("man is a compassionate and sensible being") in favor of the more realistic Hobbes ("all mankind [is in] a perpetual and restless desire for power"). As a father of four sons, I've signed on to Mr. Sowell's summation of a parent's duty: "Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."
Tony Woodlief on parenting
The most dramatic change in the day-to-day experience of childhood since the abolition of child labor is the decline of the street as a place where children can play writes Peter Wilby in the Guardian.
Britain has lost the art of socialising the young.
What we can do is give children more space and stop treating them as though they were an alien species, to be corralled into organised activities in designated locations. The street and the neighbourhood, not supervised playgrounds approved by health and safety officers, are the child's natural environment. That is where they should learn how to rub along with each other and with adults from outside the family; where they should learn the limits of acceptable social behaviour; where they should learn to climb and fall out of trees, to explore abandoned buildings and scrubby bits of unused land in which they can invent games and let off steam. "Even the youngest children talked about having freedom and time away from parents and adult supervision," says the Play England report
WHAT COULD BE more natural than a mother down on the rec-room floor, playing with her 3-year-old amid puzzles, finger-puppets, and Thomas the Tank Engine trains? Look -- now she's conducting a conversation between a stuffed shark and Nemo, the Pixar clown fish! Giggles all around. Not to mention that the tot is learning the joys of stories and narrative, setting him on a triumphal path toward school.
A "natural" scene? Actually, parent-child play of this sort has been virtually unheard of throughout human history, according to the anthropologist David Lancy. And three-fourths of the world's current population would still find that mother's behavior kind of dotty.
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"Adults think it is silly to play with children" in most cultures, says Lancy, who teaches at Utah State University. Play is a cultural universal, he concedes, "but adults aren't part of the picture." Yet middle-class and upper-middle-class Americans -- abetted, he says, by psychologists -- are increasingly proclaiming the parents-on-all-fours style the One True Way to raise a smart, well-adjusted child.
A contentious debate has bloomed.
If I were someone with a history of post-partum depression and I were pregnant again, I would definitely be interested in this.
Ingesting the placenta
Debi French was dreading the birth of her fourth child. She wanted the baby, to be sure, but she was terrified of being visited again with the overwhelming despair that came over her in the days and weeks after her last delivery.
French's midwife offered her an unusual remedy: She suggested the expectant mother ingest her own placenta as a means of allaying postpartum depression. The temporary organ was saved, dried and emulsified, then placed in gelatin capsules and taken by the mother in the months after the birth in December 2004.
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The practice, known as placentophagy, is far from widespread and is received with great skepticism by more traditional medical experts. But among a small but vocal contingent of expectant mothers and proponents, it is strongly believed that the organ created by the woman's body to pass nutrients between mother and fetus and is expelled after birth is rich in chemicals that can help mitigate fluctuations in hormones believed to cause postpartum depression.
Seems as most mammals do precisely that, but it's tough to get control of the placenta in some hospitals where, because it contains blood, it's classified as hazardous medical waste. But not for long I bet since Ann Swenson went to court .
"We didn't even have to have a trial — the judge said, 'Give it to her' — so it was shocking to everybody, actually,"
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The hospital has been storing the placenta in a freezer; Swanson says it's probably too late for it to be of any medicinal use to her. "Recovering from a C-section was a lot more traumatic, and I was definitely a bit emotional, so my husband will attest I definitely could have used my placenta," she says.
I expect the hospitals will find a way to charge mothers much as they do with umbilical blood banks.
Having so recently lost my mother, Geography Incarnate is especially telling.
To be a Mother is to be the sacrament--the effective symbol--of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home: in the simple sense that we begin our days by a long sojourn within the body of a woman; in the extended sense that she remains our center of gravity throughout the years. She is the very diagram of belonging, the where in whose vicinity we are fed and watered, and have our wounds bound up and our noses wiped. She is geography incarnate.
....The mother is the geographical center of her family, the body out of whom their diversity springs, the neighborhood in which that diversity begins ever so awkwardly to dance its way back to the true Body which is the Mother of us all. Her role then is precisely to be there for them. Not necessarily over there, but there--thereness itself, if you will; not necessarily in her place but place itself to them; not necessarily at home but home itself.
Sweden has long been ahead of other countries in exploring new ways to insure diversity, support multiculturalism and gender equality with such vigor that British historian called them The New Totalitarians.
So maybe it's not surprising that young boys in pre-school and kindergarten are sometimes forced to wear dresses and use girls' names.
The noted Swedish blogger Fjordman reports a story by Swedish journalist Todd Lundgren who inveighs against recommendations by the Swedish Teachers' Union for pre-school teachers to promote gender and sexual equality among the very very young.
“A three-year-old doesn’t have to learn queer theory, a four-year-old shouldn’t have to be force-fed lectures on gay sex by some sex freak from the Teachers’ Union. Children are supposed to play and discover their roles entirely on their own. Children are defenseless and shouldn’t be exposed to indoctrination, neither regarding sex nor politics.
When Lundgren received a email threatening to report him to the police for what he had written, Lundgren replied
“To give sex education to preschool children, to force them to have an opinion on gay sex and queer (lesbians, transsexuals, bisexuality, fetishism, cross over, sex change etc.) I regard as abuse of children. (…) Little children, we are talking about three to six-year-olds here, cannot in the preschool protect themselves from these sexual assaults. Their parents are not there, the children are totally left to themselves.
One commenter said
“My 13-year-old son had ‘equality day’ [in school] and had to listen to a transvestite. I have myself never encountered or talked to one during my considerably longer life. Why is this important? Today’s children know nothing about the crimes of Communism, but everything about the sexual orientation of transvestites.”
Are far are pro-choice people willing to extend choice? How far does a woman's right to choose extend before some balk? When a child may have Down's Syndrome? When a child is not the sex the woman wants? What if they discover the gene that predisposes a child to homosexuality, should a woman be allowed to abort?
Mollie at Get Religion explores when choice and diversity collide in a post that sheds new light on the abortion debate.
And many are finding that, while they support a woman’s right to have an abortion if she does not want to have a baby, they are less comfortable when abortion is used by women who don’t want to have a particular baby.
“How much choice do you really want to give?” asked Arthur Caplan, chairman of the department of medical ethics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “That’s the challenge of prenatal testing to pro-choicers.”
Only one in four high school graduates who took a core curriculum met the benchmarks for college readiness in English, math, reading and science according to new report. Almost 20% didn't even met one benchmark.
Sobering indeed since these students are our future.
The efforts some moms are making to help out their children and grandchildren are quite remarkable. They are the Grandboomers profiled today in the New York Times.
“This is the first generation where we have so many older people living long enough, being healthy enough and being affluent enough to provide these services on a large scale” since women entered the workplace in large numbers, Dr. Cherlin said.
But the involvement cuts across the economic spectrum. According to the census, 19.4 percent of preschool children with working mothers were primarily entrusted to grandparents in 2002, the latest year for which there are statistics. Grandparents took charge more often than fathers (18.2 percent), day care (19 percent) or hired help (9 percent). In 1995, grandparents ranked third behind fathers and day care centers, at 15.9 percent.
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Some grandparents find lending a hand fulfilling. Kay Govoni of Burlington, Mass., retired 10 years ago so she could take care of her grandchildren full time.
“I do think that a lot of people my age are beginning to see that, O.K., we’ve retired, and so what do you do with your life: spend it all in a selfish let’s-go-play, let’s-go to-Florida, let’s-go-out-to-dinner lifestyle?” she said. “That gets old hat very fast.”
Courtney Martin writes For Girls Who Hate Their Bodies: A Spiritual Crisis in the Christian Science Monitor and worries about anorexia of the soul.
...our worth in the world has always been tied to our looks, grades, and gifts – not the amazing miracle of mere existence.
In this climate, we feel perpetually called to perfect our own "body projects" – the term used by historian Joan Jacob Brumberg. Thinness and achievement stand in for the qualities of kindness and humility. We think that our perfect bodies – not God's grace or good works – will get us into heaven. We have no deeply held sense of our own divinity, so we chase after some unattainable ideal. Perfect girls, as a result, feel they are never enough. Never disciplined enough. Never accomplished enough. Never thin enough.
Parents praise their kids too much and their children are responding with a stunning lack of confidence in their ability to tackle new challenges. Surprisingly, it's often criticism that conveys a positive belief in a child's ability to do better.
If you want your above average child to do well, don't praise them for their intelligence, but for their effort and their persistence.
So concludes Carol Dweck and her team at Columbia. According to a survey they conducted,
85 percent of American parents think it’s important to tell their kids that they’re smart. In and around the New York area, according to my own (admittedly nonscientific) poll, the number is more like 100 percent.
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Giving kids the label of “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it.
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Dweck’s research on overpraised kids strongly suggests that image maintenance becomes their primary concern—they are more competitive and more interested in tearing others down. A raft of very alarming studies illustrate this.
The Power and Peril of Praising Your Kids
Also cited in the article is Dr. Roy Baumeister, a former proponent of self-esteem.
After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”
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He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements:
It doesn't take long for kids to discount praise and to consider it as a sign that they lack ability.
Psychologist Wulf-Uwe Meyer, a pioneer in the field, conducted a series of studies where children watched other students receive praise. According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.
As I struggle to finish my book, I've been thinking about fear a lot lately, fear as the parent of regret.
Apart from an awareness of danger present in the moment, fear is the most paralyzing, enfeebling and deadening emotion that robs us from engaging fully in life. I've noticed that kids today are far more fearful than we ever were or so it seems. Paula Spencer writes
We Protect Kids From Everything But Fear
After 14 years and four kids, I thought I'd feel comfortable as a mother. Instead, I'm increasingly aware of a prickly new sensation: that I'm some kind of renegade. Who knew that buying potato chips would become a radical act? Or that letting my daughters walk home from school alone would require administration approval? How did I, a middle-of-the-road mom, become a social deviant?
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Watching my daughter's friends ogle my pantry, I realized there's one big, legitimate fear that I haven't heard anybody mention: what's the effect of our collective paranoia on the kids? Yes, these very kids we want to be so self-sufficient, responsible, confident, happy and creative (not to mention not food-obsessed). They're growing up thinking these weirdly weenie views are healthy and normal.
Walking out my front door that day, each girl happily clutched a plastic baggie stuffed with the exotic kid snacks that my daughter had doled out in pity. I may be a rebel mom, but at least I'm not afraid of a chocolate-chip cookie.
It reminds me of nothing so much as this Chesterton quote
When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.
NY Judge rules Lawsuit against the clinic that used the wrong sperm can proceed.
The couple says that they have been forced to raise a child who is "not even the same race, nationality, color ... as they are," the judge said in the ruling.
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The judge quoted the couple as saying that after their daughter, Jessica, was born Oct. 19, 2004, they knew something was wrong because of her physical appearance.
They say that "while we love Baby Jessica as our own, we are reminded of this terrible mistake each and every time we look at her; it is simply impossible to ignore," the judge's decision said.
But what are they going to say to their daughter when she is older? That she is a "terrible mistake?" There are a lot of lawsuits that should never be filed. Even though they have been "wronged", money damages will never right it, while the lawsuit itself will have incalculable damage on the child later on in life
Are Umbilical Blood Banks "Taking Advantage" of Parents?
You could spend thousands of dollars ($1700-$2500) to collect plus the doctor's fee and your insurer won't cover the cost. Add that to the annual fee of $175-$200 that you know will go up, and you're talking real money without understanding the limited benefits.
Earlier this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics said parents should only bank if they have an older child with a condition that could benefit.
Because genetic diseases are already present in umbilical cord blood, the cells cannot help children who later develop that type of disease, although they could help family members.
You might want to consider donation to public banks that store blood for treatment and research.
"You also don't know what can happen. A lot of diseases, most diseases are not genetically based," he said, citing anemia and brain injuries.
"It's like an expensive insurance policy, but right now I can't tell you what my insurance is against,
When anorexia is diagnosed, it takes about one year to fully refeed an anorexic child at home and another year for the sisters and brothers to get back to normal behavior.
A Diagnosis for One, but an Impact Shared
For better or worse, what had happened to her sister had happened to her, and to all of us. None of us would ever be the same again.
And you thought men could father babies at any age. Seems as if the older they get, the more they face an increased risk of fathering children with abnormalities like autism and schizophrenia.
Most teen-agers multitask because they can and they have the gadgets to do so. Yet some neuroscientists are raising red flags that those teenagers may be harming their still developing brains.
Teens Can Multitask, But What Are Costs?
Here's Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
"Introducing multitasking in younger kids in my opinion can be detrimental. One of the biggest problems about multitasking is that it's almost impossible to gain a depth of knowledge of any of the tasks you do while you're multitasking. And if it becomes normal to do, you'll likely be satisfied with very surface-level investigation and knowledge."
Russell Poldrack, associate professor of psychology at UCLA, who did a study
Multitaskers "may not be building the same knowledge that they would be if they were focusing. While multitasking makes them feel like they are being more efficient, research suggests that there's very little you can do that involves multitasking that you can be as good at when you're not multitasking."
But researchers don't know for sure. David Meyer, director of the Brain, Cognition and Action Laboratory at the University of Michigan.
"The belief is they're getting good at this and that they're much better than the older generation at it and that there's no cost to their efficiency."
Seems to me, teenagers should learn both multitasking and deep concentration if they really what to prepared for becoming a fully-functioning grown-ups.
Some jobs, like air traffic controllers, may demand multi-tasking, but others, like surgeons, demand absolute focus.
Those little things that look like gummy candies are the feet of Amillia Taylor who was born weighing less than 10 oz just 22 weeks after she was conceived.
She is the youngest premature baby to survive and she just went home today weighing 4 lbs.
She's truly a miracle baby with an amazing spirit. Congratulations to her doctors and her parents from Homestead, Florida.
You go, Amillia!
Even though Britain is the fourth wealthiest nation in the world, its children are the worst off in the world's 21 richest nations.
The Betrayal of a Generation is shocking and depressing.
The UNICEF report blames it on family breakdown, drink, drugs teenage sex and fear of violence.
The Government has stripped the last tax breaks from marriage while bringing in benefits like tax credits which help single parents rather than couples.
Yet Unicef linked single parent families and stepfamilies with poor education, poor health and poor quality jobs.
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Robert Whelan of the Civitas think-tank said: 'I have seen the evidence piling up for 20 years that married families are better for children than single parents or stepfamilies. It has become impossible to ignore.
'The question is how long the Government can close its eyes to the reality.'
Teenagers blame the baby boomers.
I happened upon this article in the New Oxford Journal, called American Genocide.
What struck me was after the experience of raising and living with a child with Down's Syndrome, none of the families would, even if they could, go back and correct the abnormal gene.
Recently, attending a Down Syndrome League dinner, I asked the families at my table the following question: "If you could go back and correct the genetic abnormality in your baby, would you do it?" Everyone said "No." They all said that they would not change their families at all. I then asked them if they would choose to have the same child, but without the genetic abnormality. They all said "No." They explained that the Down syndrome child is a unique individual and that Down syndrome defines the child as uniquely as any other genome (genetic pattern). I was amazed. Here were middle- to upper-class Americans who are accustomed to having everything they want, and they were telling me that what the world may call abnormal they call normal. But more than this, they told me that their child was an untold blessing to their families, bringing to it what their "normal" children could not provide. Moreover, the overwhelming number of people with Down syndrome will tell you that their life is good and that they experience happiness.
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In the U.S. today 85 to 90 percent of Down syndrome babies are selectively put to death. They are selectively aborted by their own mothers, usually on the advice of their physician.
When Kevin Cohen, 20, was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper in 2002, he was single, although he dreamed of a family some day.
His parents sued to gain access to his sperm, a sample of which had been taken 2 hours after his death, because they wanted to continue their bloodline into the future. They wanted a grandchild even if the hospital said only a spouse could have access to the dead man's sperm.
Four years later, an Israeli court ruled that his family can have his sperm impregnated into the body of a woman he never met.
Family Gets OK to Use Dead Man's Sperm.
... soldiers increasingly have been leaving sperm samples, or explicit instructions on post-mortem extraction, before heading to battle.
She said she knew of more than 100 cases of Israeli soldiers who, before last summer's war with Lebanese guerillas, asked to have their sperm saved if they were killed. American soldiers have also begun donating sperm before heading to Iraq, she said.
"I think it is a human revolution," Rosenblum said. "Ten years ago, who would believe that a human being can continue after he has died. I think it is great for humanity."
Rosenblum said the woman who is to act as surrogate mother has requested to remain anonymous.
"She's like family to us," Rachel Cohen told the Tribune. "Cruel and good fate brought us together."
When grandparents can't see their grandchildren because of family disputes, it's always sad, and especially so when the grandchildren are the only connection the grandparents have to their child, killed in the 9/11 attacks.
“Sometimes, the spouse is remarried and just doesn’t have time for Grandma and Grandpa anymore,”
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One 9/11 family advocate said he had encountered more than 100 conflicts in which aging parents of a World Trade Center victim, desperate to remain connected to the children of their lost offspring, had found themselves in bitter struggles with a surviving spouse who would rather they did not. A mediator who helped negotiate settlements among 9/11 families in the early years after the attacks said 1 in 10 of his cases involved estranged grandparents.
They are called 4D scans, a more developed form of ultrasound, that produces a "real-time" video of tins in the womb as they move.
There's even one of twins that appear to be kissing.
In Argentina, what happened to the children of the 'disappeared' who were never returned to their next of kin?
Claudia Carlotto, coordinator of the National Commission for Right to Identity said,
"It is an open wound, an unfinished search, an unrepaired damage,"
Argentina's 'recovered grandchildren' seeking truth.
For three decades, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, formed by mothers of the disappeared, have struggled to find their surviving grandchildren. They have scoured birth records, filed lawsuits, and established a DNA bank with samples from thousands of relatives. Thanks to their efforts, dozens of children were reunited with their families, but hundreds more, now adults, remained undiscovered.
"We have long said there will come a day when our grandchildren will search for us, and that day has finally come," said Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit, 87, vice president of the Grandmothers group.
What is was like in the 19th century.
Children, Parents Drive Each Other to Early Graves.
A pair of researchers, drawing on the experience of nearly 22,000 couples in the 19th century -- has measured the "fitness cost" of human reproduction. This is the price that parents pay in their own health and longevity for the privilege of having their genes live on in future generations. The findings, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, manage to be both predictable and surprising.
Not surprisingly, women paid a bigger price than men. Older mothers were four times as likely to die in the year after having a child than their mates. Having lots of children was especially risky. A mother of 12 had five times the risk of dying prematurely as a mother of three. Even after their child-bearing years came to an end, women who had had many children died earlier than women who had had few.
The price of parenthood wasn't trivial for men, either. Despite the obvious fact that men avoided the hazards of childbirth, fathering more children meant more risk of dying before their time, too.
And it wasn't only parents who paid the "fitness cost" of reproduction.
The later-born children in very large families had less chance than their older brothers and sisters of surviving into adulthood and having children themselves. Losing a mother raised every child's risk of dying young.
In the chaotic aftermath of Katrina, 3 state troopers and 7 Illinois conservation officers, using flat-bottomed boats, rescued nitrogen tanks filled with 1400 embryos from a sweltering hospital.
On January 16th, Rebekah Markham will give birth to one of them, nine months after being implanted with one of the rescued embryos.
UPDATE: It's a boy! Noah Benton Markham.
Named after the most famous flood survivor of all
Emily Yoffe, an advice columnist, found that the advice she gave to a pregnant woman to marry her boyfriend and think about the new baby rather than what her parents would think and her advice to stable, happy couples to have children provoked the most mail, mainly con, then she got all year.
readers let me know that my notion that a young woman in a committed relationship should marry the father of her child-to-be is as passé as serving aspic at the wedding—if there were a wedding.
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One said - Marriage and motherhood are two of the biggest steps a woman will ever take, and to take one just because you're taking the other is ludicrous."
With nearly 40% of children being born to unwed mothers, it's the "unmarriage revolution", one with disastrous consequences.
Who are these women listening to?
When will these women wise up and think about their own futures and the futures of their children that will be handicapped in just about every respect by having only one parent.
Miss Kelly has a fine summary post on Kids, Marriage, Mothers and Fathers, Wealth and Poverty.
UPDATE: T.J. knows all about the DNA syndrome - DNA -Daddy Not Around
"Most of the kids I deal with today, they say, 'My mama be tripping' or 'My daddy, I don't know where that sucker's at.' They're angry. They're raising themselves. ... No wonder we've got 14-year-old kids having kids. That 14-year-old girl is on her own and she's easy prey for men. That 14-year-old boy has a friend who's 21 and you wonder why you've got a Glock in your house.
"I know. That 14-year-old boy was me. That man preying on the girls was me. We've got to raise our children. They can't raise themselves, and that's where the problem is. A lot of men, especially black guys, we say we're not with our baby's mama because of what that woman did to us ... .
Katrina Clark's story, My Father Was An Anonymous Sperm Donor, broke my heart.
...a whole other part of me was a mystery. That part came from my father. The only thing was, I had never met him, never heard any stories about him, never seen a picture of him. I didn't know his name. My mother never talked about him -- because she didn't have a clue who he was.
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I'm here to tell you that emotionally, many of us are not keeping up. We didn't ask to be born into this situation, with its limitations and confusion. It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the "products" of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place.
Never did think of the children mean so much.
When did adults' rights to have children trump the needs of the children?
We have jumped into this brave new world with little thought of the consequences. Now, we are seeing the results. Some women are buying sperm online and exploring made-to-order embryos.
The donors aren't off the hook like they once thought. Some are facing compulsory child support for the donor, Buffalogirl who blogs at Whosedaughter? reminds us that one person's DNA is another person's 'dad'. Donor-conceived children demand the right to search for their biological fathers much as adopted children do.
What is sure is that such children will be genetically bewildered with a "life debt" leaving them feeling confused, alienated and 'experimental' with little understanding of what a real family is.
This is the future being created before our eyes.
At least six million American children have serious mental disorders, according to government surveys, a number that has tripled since the early 1990s writes Zach Lynch in Brain Waves who has many links to articles describing some the difficulties families have in sorting through conflicting advice and diagnoses.
Such a tragedy for both the children and the parents.
I wonder how much is exacerbated by the frenetic pace of the modern world, the pressure to compete and succeed, fragmented families and an increasingly depraved mass culture.
It's hard for anyone to find a foothold, a sure place on which to grow.
Miss Kelley has a fine discussion on Kids, Marriage, Mothers and Fathers, Wealth and Poverty wherein she quotes
First, Claudia Anderson writes at The Weekly Standard about a report produced by the Commission on Parenthood's Future, an independent, nonpartisan group of scholars and leaders. From the report:
“The two-person mother-father model of parenthood is being changed to meet adults’ rights to children rather than children’s needs to know and be raised, whenever possible, by their mother and father,” according to the report, The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs."
then Kal Hymowitz who has written that the marriage gap is increasingly responsible for the growing divide between economic classes.
When the mass consumer culture is so sexualized and the chastity of young women not only devalued but derided, it's only a few wrong steps and they're trapped in the culture of poverty where having children without a husband is a rite of passage.
Last quote from Miss Kelley -
The Brookings Institute has determined that if people 1) graduate from high school, 2) get married, 3) don't have kids until after they're married, and 4) have small families, they're virtually guaranteed to avoid poverty. I don't know how we shift ourselves back to committing to marriage and bringing back a social stigma to single parenting, but we need to swing that pendulum back.
A young blogger, donor-conceived, writes about the psychological and emotional anguish young adults like her experience as they try to craft their adult identities. Whosedaughter? does not look kindly on adults who try to re-engineer the family. In this post she quotes a Canadian ethicist Margaret Somerville
Evidence is starting to come in: “Donor conceived adults” describe powerful feelings of loss of identity through not knowing one or both biological parents and their wider biological families, and describe themselves as “genetic orphans”. They believe society was complicit in a serious wrong done to them in the way they were conceived and ask, “How could anyone think they had the right to do this to me?”
We now need to recognise in law what, traditionally, we have simply assumed: that children’s fundamental human rights include knowing who their biological parents are and if at all possible being reared by them, and being conceived with a natural biological heritage – untampere
