From the Population Institute, the basics on the Business of Life.
From the World Factbook, total fertility rate, 2009, selected countries.
Via Happy Catholic, comes this absolutely wrenching and beautiful story with photos of the birth of Nella Cordelia who came into this world with Down Syndrome, not what her mother expected.
Love me. Love me. I'm not what you expected, but oh, please love me.
That was the most defining moment of my life. That was the beginning of my story.
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Life moves on. And there have been lots of tears since. There will be. But, there is us. Our Family. We will embrace this beauty and make something of it. We will hold our precious gift and know that we are lucky. I feel lucky. I feel privileged. I feel there is a story so beautiful in store...and we get to live it. Wow.
Welcome Nella to the world and the love of your parents, family and friends. May you always be surrounded by their love.
One family policy expert says Student loan debt is a 'crushing burden' on families.
“In cultures around the world and throughout recorded history, the common practice has been to use dowries (the property brought by young women into their marriages) and other marital gifts to provide newlyweds with working capital at the beginning of their marriage,” Carlson wrote in a 2005 paper. “This cultural strategy has aimed at encouraging marriage, stable homes, and the birth of children.”
However, the recent practice of burdening young adults with substantial educational debt appears to significantly discourage marriage and childbirth.
At the FRC on Friday, Carlson cited a 2002 survey indicating that 14 percent of indebted students delayed marriage because of their loans, while 21 percent delayed having children. In 1988 these numbers were nine and 12 percent, respectively.
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This debt can also cause problems in marriages. One survey which examined 41 marital problems and found that “debt brought into marriage” was the third most problematic issue facing newlyweds. Among respondents who had no children, debt was the second most problematic problem. Among respondents ages 29 and below, debt was named the most problematic issue.
Carlson suggested student loan debt has encouraged a “retreat” from marriage.
One grad student determined to avoid debt lived in his van and Pinched.
In my van there were no orgies or coke lines, no overweight motivational speakers. To me, the van was what Kon-Tiki was to Heyerdahl, what the GMC van was to the A-Team, what Walden was to Thoreau. It was an adventure.
Living in a van was my grand social experiment. I wanted to see if I could -- in an age of rampant consumerism and fiscal irresponsibility -- afford the unaffordable: an education.
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My "radical living" experiment convinced me that the things plunging students further into debt -- the iPhones, designer clothes, and even "needs" like heat and air conditioning, for instance -- were by no means "necessary." And I found it easier to "do without" than I ever thought it would be. Easier by far than the jobs I'd been forced to take in order to pay off my loans.
Most undergrads imagine they'll effortlessly pay off their loans when they start getting paid the big bucks; they're living in a state of denial, disregarding the implications of a tough job market and how many extra years of work their spending sprees have sentenced them to. But "facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored," as Aldous Huxley famously said.
Life-saving pregnancy stem cells
Italians suggest tailor-made treatments for babies possible
A pregnant woman carries stem cells that could be used in critical medical treatments for her baby, either in the womb or later in life, a team of Italian scientists has announced. These cells, found in the womb during pregnancy, can be removed during a simple antenatal test and stored for future use, concluded the study, which appears in next week's edition of the Cloning and Stem Cells journal.
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''We took these cells from women whose fetuses were affected with spinal muscular atrophy and we were able to correct the genetic defect using genetic therapy,'' said Novelli. Although the technique is not yet sophisticated enough to cure the disease, the team says the day could come when corrected cells could be injected back into the fetus to treat genetic disorders before birth.
Hats off to this remarkable mother.
Josephine Houben's son Rom was left paralysed at the age of 20 after a car crash in 1983.
Although doctors insisted his consciousness was 'extinct' and that he was unaware of the world around him, Mrs Houben refused to accept the diagnosis.
Josephine Houben insists she knew her son Rom could understand her during his 23 year 'coma'
Three years ago, she contacted a leading brain specialist, who re-examined Mr Houben and found his brain was working almost normally.
It emerged he was suffering from 'locked-in' syndrome, and that although he had lost control of his body he was still fully aware of what was happening.
Mrs Houben, 73, who lives in Liege, Belgium, said: 'The important message is never give up. You must have faith.
'My husband and I always knew instinctively that he was there as a human being.
'But the doctors were always doubtful and said he was a vegetable.
'But my husband and I knew he wasn't.
'If I asked him to move his eyes in a certain direction he did so.
'The doctors weren't impressed and they said it was a nervous tic or a coincidence. They didn't believe us.
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We took him often on holiday with us to the south of France.
'I fed him with a spoon and we talked to him and treated him in every way as if he was a normal person.
'When my husband died in 1997 I went to the hospital to tell him that his father was dead. He shut his eyes.
'There were no tears but he understood everything.
'Recently, when he was able to communicate with me, he passed me a message via the computer to say, "Sorry, I could not help you mummy when father went".'
IN 1975 Hung Ba Lee was only 5 when he fled Vietnam in a fishing boat piloted by his father, a commander in the South Vietnamese Navy and the rest of his family and 400 other refugess. They were rescued at sea by the US navy, taken to a U.S. base in the Philippines, then a refugee camp in California and finally to Virginia where the family rebuilt their lives.
Last week, Le returned to Vietnam as commander of a Navy warship.
Unique homecoming to Vietnam for US commander.
Le returned on the Lassen, an $800 million, 509-foot destroyer equipped with Tomahawk missiles and a crew of 300. The ship and the USS Blue Ridge, the command vessel for the U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet, are making the latest in a series of goodwill visits to Vietnam, which began in 2003 when the USS Vandergriff paid a port call to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.
"I thought that one day I would return but I really didn't expect to be returning as the commander of a Navy warship," Le said after stepping ashore Saturday. "It's an incredible personal honor."
"I'm proud to be an American, but I'm also very proud of my Vietnamese heritage," said Le, who spoke a few halting words in Vietnamese.
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Le has few memories of his three-day journey on the fishing trawler, which ended just as they were running out of food, water and fuel.
But he has vivid memories of the example set by his father, Thong Ba Le, who is now 69 and has never returned to Vietnam. After the family settled in northern Virginia, he took a job in a supermarket, where he worked his way up from bag boy to manager.
"I always wanted to be like my dad," Le said. "He persevered and overcame many challenges."
In 2006 the Food and Drug Administration approved the drug Gardasil as a vaccine against certain types of human papillomavirus (HPV) which is the primary cause of cervical cancer in women. Gardasil is manufactured by Merck and the company has aggressively marketed the drug including political contributions through its PAC.
Many state and local governments have proposed that Gardasil be required for school girls as young as those entering the sixth grade.
Now one of the lead researchers for the Merck drug, Dr. Diane Harper, says the "Pubic should receive more complete warnings."
"Parents and women must know that deaths occurred. Not all deaths that have been reported were represented in Dr. Slade's work, one-third of the death reports were unavailable to the CDC, leaving the parents of the deceased teenagers in despair that the CDC is ignoring the very rare but real occurrences that need not have happened if parents were given information stating that there are real, but small risks of death surrounding the administration of Gardasil."
After 26 million vaccinations, Dr. Harper says it will have NO effect on the rate of cervical cancer in the U.S.
To date, 15,037 girls have officially reported adverse side effects from Gardasil to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). These adverse effects include Guilliane Barre, lupus, seizures, paralysis, blood clots, brain inflammation and many others. The CDC acknowledges that there have been 44 reported deaths."
Merck's Dr. Harper told CBS News that a girl is more likely to die from an adverse reaction to Gardasil than from cervical cancer.
What would be the point in promoting the inoculation of millions of girls and women with a useless, sometimes dangerous drug? And it really is useless: Merck's current project is to push it to pre-teen girls, but Dr. Harper pointed out that, once a girl hits puberty, any effectiveness of the vaccine disappears, and she has to start over again with the course of shots. And by the way, the efficacy of the drug in pre-teen girls hasn't actually been tested.
One thing we know about Gardasil is that each three-dose treatment costs $360, which has helped Merck a lot. It's been one of the company's top-selling drugs.
Growing up without a father actually changes the way your brain develops.
This is Your Brain Without Dad
German biologist Anna Katharina Braun and others are conducting research on animals that are typically raised by two parents, in the hopes of better understanding the impact on humans of being raised by a single parent. Dr. Braun's work focuses on degus, small rodents related to guinea pigs and chinchillas, because mother and father degus naturally raise their babies together.
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Their preliminary analysis indicates that fatherless degu pups exhibit more aggressive and impulsive behavior than pups raised by two parents.
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The neuronal differences were observed in a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is related to emotional responses and fear, and the orbitofrontal cortex, or OFC, the brain's decision-making center.
The balance between these two brain parts is critical to normal emotional and cognitive functioning, according to Dr. Braun. If the OFC isn't active, the amygdala "goes crazy, like a horse without a rider," she says. In the case of the fatherless pups, there were fewer dendritic spines in the OFC, while the dendrite trees in the amygdala grew more and longer branches.
A preliminary analysis of the degus' behavior showed that fatherless animals seemed to have a lack of impulse control, Dr. Braun says. And, when they played with siblings, they engaged in more play-fighting or aggressive behavior.
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An OECD report found that just 57% of children in the U.S. live with both parents, among the lowest percentages of the world's richest nations. The report, which sparked some controversy when it was released in September, found that children in single-parent households have an increased risk of delinquency and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, as well as poorer scholastic performance.
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The bottom line, says Dr. Braun, is that parents need to fuel their children's brains with talk, touch and sensitive stimulation that involves give and take.
Parents, she says, "are the sculptors of their children's brains."
The social consequences of unwed mothers are long-lasting and heart-breaking.
Why don't you guys study like the kids from Africa?"
In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class -- and was constantly distracting other students when he did -- shot back: "It's because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study."
Another student angrily challenged me: "You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us." When I did, not one hand went up.
Making the Grade Isn't About Race. It's About Parents by Patrick Welsh.
It's not about race though that is what school administrators and community activists focus on. There's plenty of money for schools.
"The real problem," says Glenn Hopkins, president of Alexandria's Hopkins House, which provides preschool and other services to low-income families, "is that school superintendents don't realize -- or won't admit -- that the education gap is symptomatic of a social gap."
Hopkins notes that student achievement is deeply affected by issues of family, income and class, things superintendents have little control over.
In The Daddy Gap, Amy Alkon, the Advice Goddess points to a 2005 Kay Hymowitz piece in City Journal. Kay Hymowitz is a trenchant observer and writer about the marriage gap that is increasingly responsible for the growing divide between economic classes.
1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
By now, these facts shouldn't be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto "baby mamas." Not so; it is a largely low-income--and disproportionately black--phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal--one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.
Until black leaders come to grips with what is really happening in the inner cities, the plight of black males and black females will only get worse.
The men won't grow up, won't become fully formed, but stay passionless and apathetic, distraught in their failure to launch. As a black woman pleaded, "Enough of this selfishness: Time for black men to act like men."
Too many young girls may yearn for marriage, but making babies is something they can do, something they believe they must do if they want meaning in their lives. Misbegotten health policies are not teaching young girls that they are too young to start families, but giving them contraceptives without parental consent and essentially saying do what you want.
The model of the two-person, mother-father model of parenthood is being changed to meet adults' rights to children rather than children's needs to be known and , whenever possible, by their mother and father. It's the ultimate selfishness that will continue to cause ruin in people's lives and in our society.
How do we respond to the fact that so many children are starving for a father?
Mrs Morrisroe-Clutton, a librarian, fell ill at the end of July after eating a vegetarian burger from a fish and chip shop in her home town of Wrexham.
She was admitted to intensive care at the town's Maelor Hospital where doctors diagnosed she had contracted E.coli.
They put her into a medically induced coma and placed her on a dialysis machine to try to control her seizures and kidney failure.
She had given birth a few weeks earlier. Her husband made and then played tapes of their new-born son Oliver to her in the hospital.
Coma mother wakes after hearing gurgles from her 11 week-old son
'I knew that I was dying,' she said. 'I confess that at one stage I gave up. 'I confess that at one stage I gave up. Frankly, I wanted to die.
'But then I heard Ollie. I remember lying there thinking that I wanted to hold him, to see his face and to stroke his little hands.
'I knew that I had to live and that he needed his mother.'
When you can't look after your neighbor's child, then the nanny state has gone way too far.
In England, a policewoman was banned from looking after her colleague’s daughter because she was not a registered childminder.
The Thames Valley Police detectives – who gave birth within a few months of each other – share a job at Aylesbury Police Station in Buckinghamshire.
But the mothers, both 32, have now been told by Ofsted that surveillance teams will spy on their homes to make sure they are not continuing to care for each other’s daughter.
For the past two-and-a-half years, one looked after both of the girls while the other worked a ten-hour shift. Both worked two days a week.
In Michigan, a woman was threatened with fines for watching neighbors' kids and possibly jail time as well for operating an illegal child care home.
Lisa Snyder of Middleville says her neighborhood school bus stop is right in front of her home. It arrives after her neighbors need to be at work, so she watches three of their children for 15-40 minutes until the bus comes.
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"It's ridiculous." says Snyder. "We are friends helping friends!" She added that she accepts no money for babysitting.
This would have been unimaginable in any other age.
Pregnant mother forced to give u IVF baby after doctors implanted the wrong embryo.
I must say the parents are handling a tragic situation with a great deal of grace.
Tracey Raver is the photographer from Nebraska who, with her sister, captures these adorable photos of babies sleeping. Sweet dreams: The cutest baby pictures you'll ever see. Inspiration for new parents and grandparents.
What happened when the idea of a soul-mate marriage took hold and with it no-fault divorce that displaced the traditional idea of marriage, one that put the welfare of children first?
From National Affairs, The Evolution of Divorce by Brad Wilcox via Maggie Gallagher
In the case of divorce, as in so many others, the worst consequences of the social revolution of the 1960s and '70s are now felt disproportionately by the poor and less educated, while the wealthy elites who set off these transformations in the first place have managed to reclaim somewhat healthier and more stable habits of married life. This imbalance leaves our cultural and political elites less well attuned to the magnitude of social dysfunction in much of American society, and leaves the most vulnerable Americans — especially children living in poor and working-class communities — even worse off than they would otherwise be.
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Thus, by the time the 1970s came to a close, many Americans — rich and poor alike — had jettisoned the institutional model of married life that prioritized the welfare of children, and which sought to discourage divorce in all but the most dire of circumstances. Instead, they embraced the soul-mate model of married life, which prioritized the emotional welfare of adults and gave moral permission to divorce for virtually any reason.
Thirty years later, the myth of the good divorce has not stood up well in the face of sustained social scientific inquiry — especially when one considers the welfare of children exposed to their parents' divorces.
You may have seen this story, but it's so remarkable I just have to post it.
She thought she was saying a final goodbye to her premature infant Rachel who weighed only 20 oz and who was not breathing.
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.
"The doctors came in and said there was still no hope - but I wasn't letting go of her. We had her blessed by the hospital chaplain, and waited for her to slip away.
"But she still hung on. And then amazingly the pink colour began to return to her cheeks.
"She literally was turning from grey to pink before our eyes, and she began to warm up too."
Four months later, Rachael was allowed home weighing 8lb - the same as a newborn baby - and she has a healthy appetite.
Mother's goodbye saves her baby
The skin to skin contact is called Kangaroo mother care and it's helped other premature babies survive.
Here's a site devoted to Kangaroo mother care
After reading David Warren's latest column, I had to learn more about Tomas Masaryk the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, a statesman, philosopher and sociologist, who had a most remarkable and exemplary life.
Karl Popper, The Prague Lecture 1994
60 years ago, there lived in the Hradcany Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the great founder of the Republic of Czechoslovakia, and its Liberator President. I deeply admire Masaryk. He was one of the most important pioneers of what I have called, one or two years after Masaryk's death, the Open Society. He was a pioneer of an open society, both in theory and in practice; indeed, the greatest of its pioneers between Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.
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Never was a new state – after all, the result of a revolution – so peaceful and so successful, and so much the creative achievement of one man. And all this was not due to the absence of great difficulties; it was the result of Masaryk, s philosophy, his wisdom and his personality in which personal courage, and truthfulness, and openness, played so conspicuous a role.
According to Wikipedia, his doctoral essay at the University of Vienna, was on the phenomenon of suicide which became a book, Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization and that is what David Warren references in The killing fields.
That suicide is the ultimate subjective act, and thus, in effect, the final act of narcissism, was among the striking observations of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.
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It was Masaryk's thesis that suicide rates, already at historical highs, and climbing, in the more industrially advanced parts of Europe by the 1880s, would continue to rise through the decades ahead, with decreasing religiosity and increasing modernization.
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This was not so much a question of religious denomination, as of religious practice. There would be a rough, inverse correlation between church attendance and the suicide rate. Later statistical studies have borne this out, and Masaryk thus stands among the few sociologists whose work retains any empirical value.
Masaryk grasped the difference between depression and hopelessness, which we like to slur over today. Depression only makes one accident-prone; the real self-killer is the absence of hope for the future. This is a distinction that has been vindicated in psychiatric studies of the dying; it points directly to a dimension of human life that is irreducibly moral and religious.
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People kill themselves for all sorts of stated reasons, but what goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life, and the only sound predictor is religious formation.
That's an astounding conclusion, "what goads one man to suicide goads another to renewed life" and the only sound predictor is religious formation. Without formation in and practice of a religion, one has no tools to battle despair, meaninglessness and hopelessness.
Warren himself concludes in a column whose main focus is euthanasia, the euphemism for murder.
The many symptoms of civilizational decay that lay partly concealed beneath the surface of society only recently came into full view, in the open pornography, the open nihilism, the despairing flippancy, visible throughout our contemporary public life. But the pond was long draining, and it is only now we see fish flopping in the mud.
Euthanasia is the final "life issue," the clincher for what the last pope called "the culture of death." Even when legalizing abortion, we agreed only to the slaughter of human beings we could not see. It was still possible to look away, to pretend we were not killing "real people," only "potential people." But when we embrace so-called "mercy killing," we embrace slaughter not only for the sick and old, but ultimately, the "option" of easy suicide for ourselves. It will be hard to go lower.
Parents explain to their children how they came to be. No Stork Involved but Mom and Dad Had Help.
Marla Culliton and her husband, Steven, of Swampscott, Mass., have 7-year-old twins, Jacob and Naomi. “When they were 4, I told them, ‘First you have to get married, then you have to have a nice house, then you can go to a doctor, and he can help you,’ ” said Mrs. Culliton, a dental hygienist. “At 5, they said, ‘How is the baby made?’ I said: ‘They come from a sperm and an egg. The doctor made you in a dish.’ ”
Parents of boys should read Charles Martel on How My Parents Raised a Sissy
In the 1950s when I was a grade-school kid, my father was a heavy equipment mechanic with lots of hair on his chest and a blue-collar fondness for spending much of his time out in the garage. I remember the time I walked out there and found him sewing a hole in one of his overalls. Until then, I has assumed that sewing was something only girls and women did.
“How come you’re sewing your overalls, Dad? Shouldn’t Mom be doing that?”
“Well, son, they’re my overalls so they’re my responsibility,” he answered. “Besides, I already know how to sew.”
“Where’d you learn that?” My voice indicated that I thought the person responsible for teaching him this skill should be boiled in oil for violating some basic law of nature.
“In the Army,” he said. “Everybody learned a little basic sewing so he could take care of himself out in the field.” My father paused, this former paratrooper who’d fought Hitler in North Africa, Sicily and Italy, and then said something that has stuck with me ever since. “The Army didn’t want a bunch of sissies running around out there. You know, men who can’t take care of themselves.”
A brave man speaking the truth, Justice Coleridge
Only marriage can mend broken Britain, says top judge
Marriage should be promoted by the Government to end the 'social anarchy' of family breakdown, a senior judge said last night.
Mr Justice Coleridge accused mothers and fathers who fail to commit to each other of engaging in a game of 'pass the partner' that has left millions of children 'scarred for life'.
In a hard-hitting speech in Parliament, he called for a change of attitude that would attach a 'stigma' to those who destroy family life and said a National Commission should be established to devise solutions for the 'epidemic' of broken homes. --
Condemning the 'endless and futile quest for a perfect relationship', he said many parents were in 'a complete and uncontrolled free-for-all where being true to oneself and one's needs is the only yardstick for controlling behaviour'.
The London Telegraph publishes a column by the same Justice, Family breakdown is now a national tragedy
Recently, I was approached by the BBC, with a view to making a documentary about family breakdown. I suggested the researcher start by spending the day with me in court, to watch a run-of-the-mill High Court case. She was stunned into silence and remained speechless when I told her that within the Royal Courts of Justice, there were 20 or so other judges engaged in similar cases.
Across inner London, well over 100 family courts were dealing with family breakdown that day, in one guise or another. Multiply that across the rest of the country, and you get some feel for the scale of the epidemic.
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I am not suggesting, of course, that all change is bad, or that all relationship breakdowns can be avoided. Genuinely intolerable relationships have to be ended with as little distress as possible. But I fear that the current state of the family represents change for the worse – and those most affected, the children, are not considered in the maelstrom that surrounds them
Everything we think we know about babies is wrong
In The Philosophical Baby developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik compiles the latest in her field’s research to paint a new picture of our inner lives at inception — one in which we are, in some ways, more conscious than adults.
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Alison Gopnik: One of the things we discovered is that imagination, which we often think of as a special adult ability, is actually in place in very young children, as early as 18 months old. That ability is very closely related to children’s ability to figure out how the world works.
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Both Piaget and Freud thought that the reason children produced so much fantastic, unreal play was that they couldn’t tell the difference between imagination and reality. But a lot of the more recent work in children’s theory of mind has shown quite the contrary. Children have a very good idea of how to distinguish between fantasies and realities. It’s just they are equally interested in exploring both.
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They already seem to appreciate the difference between the kinds of morality that comes from empathy and the kind that comes from our conventional rules. From the time they are two, they recognize both are important but in different ways. That’s pretty amazing
From the heart of Silicon Valley, eighth graders say that the negative effects of technology vastly outweighs the benefits.
“It’s bad for us, but it sure is fun.”
Through young eyes by Michael Malone reveals remarkable self knowledge by children who lived all their lives in an ocean of technological games and devices.
When asked what they find wrong with living in our modern Wired Web World, the students had no shortage of answers, most of which fell into a half-dozen categories. I’ll let the students largely speak for themselves - voices describing the dark side of the tech revolution with a sincerity few of us adults have ever heard before:
Time-waster
Loss of motivation:
Addictive: “The Internet is like a gateway drug,” says Christine Doan, 13.
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Second Hand Knowledge: This answer was probably the biggest surprise. The eighth graders seemed to intuitively appreciate that the experiences and information they received from the Web and other digital sources was essentially a simulacrum of reality - a re-creation on a glowing flat screen of the three dimensional natural world . . .and that something was being lost in the translation. “We don’t get as much out of things if we don’t experience them ourselves,” says Lauren Fahey, 13. “We seem to spend a lot of our lives as bystanders,” adds Katherine Wu, 13.
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Exposure
Disturbed Values: All of these forces can’t help but affect a young person’s sense of values. The eighth graders, in some ways sophisticated beyond their years, instinctively understand that. “We can’t respect anything anymore,” says Eric Bautista. Adds Jenna Kunz, “You don’t care about things as much; you aren’t as passionate as you should be.”
In the past couple of years, the vaccine Gardasil has been touted as the best way to protect young women against cervical cancer.
Manufactured by Merck & Co, the vaccine is designed to prevent the initial establishment of HPV, the human papillomavirius, that causes cervical cancer and is transmitted sexually. Administered in three injections over six months, Gardasil is expensive ($360).
So effective was the new vaccine, many urged that it be given to all young teenage girls as a prophylactic before they became sexually active. Some parents were horrified at the idea; most greeted the idea with great relief.
Since HPV infection shows no symptoms and has no cure, the vaccine was heavily promoted in commercials which showed teenage girls saying "I want to be one less" who gets the HPV virus.
A number of states mandated the vaccine despite the fact that no one knew the long term effects.
Now from CBS news comes new worries about Gardasil safety and very serious side effects.
The National Vaccine Information Center, a private vaccine-safety group, compared Gardasil adverse events to another vaccine, one also given to young people, but for meningitis. Gardasil had three times the number of Emergency Room visits - more than 5,000.
Reports of side effects were up to 30 times higher with Gardasil.
"If I'd have known, we never would have gotten the shot," said Emily Tarsell, whose daughter, Chris, died three weeks after her third Gardasil shot. She was one of the 29 fatalities reported in two years. "And she'd be here to hug."
Barbara Loe Fisher, co-founder of the NVIC, said: "Now we know from this report that there are more reactions and deaths associated with Gardasil than with another vaccine given in the same age group. It's irresponsible not to take action."
Mary Beth Bonacci says "The vaccine is unnecessary, it's dangerous, and it's disabling and killing young women."
We have pap smears, which detect HPV-related warts and pre-cancerous changes to the cervix. It is because of our friend the pap smear that cervical cancer deaths declined 74% between 1955 and 1992 - - the same time period wherein the rate of unmarried sexual activity was rising dramatically. Those cervical cancer deaths, according to the American Cancer Society, continue to decline at a rate of about 4% a year.
We don't need Gardasil to prevent cervical cancer. Gardasil is the closest thing I've ever seen to an out and out pharmaceutical hoax foisted on American women under the guise of "public health."
After little Morgan McCracken, 7, was hit in the head with a baseball in a backyard game, she seemed fine, but her parents, after reading about the death of Natasha Richardson took her to the emergency room after the little girl complained of a headache.
Morgan was in such bad shape by the time they got there that she had to be transferred to a children's hospital by helicopter, where she was immediately taken into surgery, according to CNN.
The McCrackens learned there that Morgan had the same injury that Natasha Richardson had died of -- according to CNN, an epidural hematoma. Mr. McCracken told the cable news outlet: "[Our doctor] told us that if we hadn't brought her in Thursday night, she never would have woken up."
But after Morgan's surgery and five days in the hospital, she's "doing fine," according to CNN, which lists the danger signs to look out for in a head injury on their web site.
Little girl saved after Natasha Richardson's death
Any head injury should be checked out.
Sometimes you need scientific research to remind people what everyone used to take for granted.
The Secret to Raising Smart Kids
Many people assume that superior intelligence or ability is a key to success. But more than three decades of research shows that an overemphasis on intellect or talent—and the implication that such traits are innate and fixed—leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unmotivated to learn.
Teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, produces high achievers in school and in life.
Parents and teachers can engender a growth mind-set in children by praising them for their effort or persistence (rather than for their intelligence), by telling success stories that emphasize hard work and love of learning, and by teaching them about the brain as a learning machine.
The number of U.S. Births Breaks Records - 4.3 million babies born. Sadly, about 40% (39.7%) were born out of wedlock.
That means 40% of those babies won't have a father bound to them by marriage to their mother.
By coincidence, today is the feast day of St. Joseph and the subject of the homily Pope Benedict XVI gave in Cameroon
St. Joseph, he said, "is not the biological father of Jesus, whose Father is God alone, and yet he lives his fatherhood fully and completely......"To be a father means above all to be at the service of life and growth."
That's what those 40% of newborns will lack - an adult male who will devote himself to their lives and growth.
More on the statistics
By racial/ethnic group: 27.8 percent for non-Hispanic whites (up from 26.6 percent in 2006);
a really appalling 71.6 percent for blacks (up from 70.7 percent);
65.2 percent for American Indians/Alaska Natives (up from 64.6 percent);
51.3 percent for Hispanics (up from 49.9 percent); and bringing up the rear,
Asians/Pacific Islanders at a paltry 16.9 percent (but still up from 16.5 percent).
What fathers bring to the table in the service of life and growth of their children. All quotes from Why Marriage Matters for Children which also has citations to all the studies referenced.
Protection against poverty
David Ellwood, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, notes:
"The vast majority of children who are raised entirely in a two-parent home will never be poor during childhood. By contrast, the vast majority of children who spend time in a single-parent home will experience poverty.
Reduced risk of criminal behavior
After studying murder and robbery rates in our nation’s cities, Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson observed, “Family structure is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, predictor of variations in urban violence across cities in the United States.” This is why neighbors should thank the married mothers on their block.
Reduced risk of substance abuse
Regardless of gender, age, family income, race or ethnicity, adolescents not living with a biological mother or father are 50 to 150% more likely to abuse and be dependent on substances and need illicit drug-abuse treatment compared to their peers living with both biological parents.
Reduced risk of sexual abuse
The journal Pediatrics reported in 2002 that, “Children residing in households with adults unrelated to them were 8 times more likely to die of maltreatment than children in households with 2 biological parents. Risk of maltreatment death was elevated for children residing with step, foster, or adoptive parents.”
Greater likelihood of educational attainment
Sara McLanahan of Princeton University finds that “regardless of which survey we looked at, children from one-parent families are about twice as likely to drop out of school as children from two-parent families.”
Children from biological two-parent families have, on average, test scores and grade-point averages that are higher, they miss fewer school days, and have greater expectations of attending college than children living with one parent. Additionally, of those from either type of family who do attend college, those from two-parent families are seven to 20 percent more likely to finish college.5
Children from divorced homes are 70 percent more likely than those living with biological parents to be expelled or suspended from school. Those living with never-married mothers are twice as likely to be expelled or suspended.
Greater physical health and mental well-being
The National Center for Health Statistics found that children living with their biological parents received professional help for behavior and psychological problems at half the rate of children not living with both biological parents.16 Other studies show the general health problems of children from broken homes is increased by 20 to 30 percent, even when adjusting for demographic variables.
Learning that 40% of newborns will not have these advantages is profoundly discouraging.
The bewildering lapses of memory in otherwise good parents who think such a thing could never happen to them.
Forgetting a child in the back seat of a hot, parked car is a horrifying, inexcusable mistake. But is it a crime? asks Gene Weingarten in Fatal Distraction
"Death by hyperthermia" is the official designation. When it happens to young children, the facts are often the same: An otherwise loving and attentive parent one day gets busy, or distracted, or upset, or confused by a change in his or her daily routine, and just... forgets a child is in the car. It happens that way somewhere in the United States 15 to 25 times a year, parceled out through the spring, summer and early fall. The season is almost upon us.
Two decades ago, this was relatively rare. But in the early 1990s, car-safety experts declared that passenger-side front airbags could kill children, and they recommended that child seats be moved to the back of the car; then, for even more safety for the very young, that the baby seats be pivoted to face the rear. If few foresaw the tragic consequence of the lessened visibility of the child . . . well, who can blame them? What kind of person forgets a baby?
The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years, it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.
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These are heartbreaking stories made even more so by how the parents were demonized.
One clinical psychologist said
Humans have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.
In hyperthermia cases, he believes, the parents are demonized for much the same reasons. "We are vulnerable, but we don't want to be reminded of that. We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we'll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don't want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters."
A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby. A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.
In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human. Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.
In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue
I like this theory, but I haven't a clue how to pronounce the scientist's name "Hrdy".
The next article in the Science section of the New York Times is more baffling. Commercials make TV shows more enjoyable.
“The punch line is that commercials make TV programs more enjoyable to watch. Even bad commercials,” said Leif Nelson, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of California, San Diego, and a co-author of the new research. “When I tell people this, they just kind of stare at me, in disbelief. The findings are simultaneously implausible and empirically coherent.”
The brain uses two forms of attention. “Directed” attention allows us to concentrate on work, reading and tests, while “involuntary” attention takes over when we’re distracted by things like running water, crying babies, a beautiful view or a pet that crawls onto our lap.
Directed attention is a limited resource. Long hours in front of a computer or studying for a test can leave us feeling fatigued. But spending time in natural settings appears to activate involuntary attention, giving the brain’s directed attention time to rest.
“It’s pretty clear that all human beings experience attentional fatigue,” Dr. Faber Taylor said. “Our attention has to be restored from that fatigue, and there is a growing body of research evidence that nature is one way that seems particularly effective at doing it.”
The New York Times reports on recess. Tara Parker-Pope concludes:
The best way to improve children’s performance in the classroom may be to take them out of it.
New research suggests that play and down time may be as important to a child’s academic experience as reading, science and math, and that regular recess, fitness or nature time can influence behavior, concentration and even grades.
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Playtime and nature time are important not only for learning but also for health and development.
To the Dairy Queen and Back by John Landretti, in Orion
Sometimes my sons and I stop the Burley Train at this open place and lean it against the goldenrod. We find spotted knapweed to look at, rosehips and blackberries. The boys like to gaze back at the highway. They wonder where it goes, so we talk about the Big Horns and the Greasy Grass, or the Ohio River and the worn hills of Kerouac’s “bushy wilderness” back east. Now and then we get into history, and I might spin an account of the early railroads, perhaps quote a few rousing lines from Gordon Lightfoot’s “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” When they ask about the Indians, and what has become of their ways, I might recount the Sioux at Wounded Knee, speaking in the plainest terms. The perspectives jar, the language varies, and I let my boys fall into that space between. They fill it with questions.
“Listen,” I say, raising a finger. “Do you hear it?”
They stiffen, and we hear once more: the elusive warble.
“A loon,” I explain. I tell them straightaway we are lucky.
Nights later Mathieu says at bedtime, “We heard a loon on our way to the Dairy Queen—didn’t we, Dad? We’re lucky. Right, Dad?”
I turn out the lamp and touch his hair, my fingers in the radiance of a child forming his world.
via Culture Making
Is it any surprise that a "Me-first" attitude fails children?
Children's lives are being blighted by Britain's selfish society, a landmark report concludes.
The Good Childhood Inquiry claims that almost all of the problems now facing young people stem from the culture of "excessive individualism" that has developed in recent decades.
It says the "me-first" attitude of adults is causing family breakdowns, competition in education, a growing gap between rich and poor, unkindness among teenagers and premature sexualisation by advertisers.
The pioneering two-year investigation, backed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and based on interviews with 35,000 children, parents and professionals, claims British children are less happy than those in almost any other developed country.
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The study blames these problems squarely on the growth of a struggle for personal status and success, which it says has filled the vacuum created by the decline of religious belief and community spirit.
Surely you've heard about the link between autism and vaccines. Some parents have been terrified to have their young children vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella. The fear of such vaccination led to the return of measles in England, Germany, Switzerland and Italy
The London Times reports that the doctor who sparked the scare with his study in the British medical journal Lancet
linking autism with vaccinations fixed the data to make the link.
MMR doctor Andrew Wakefield fixed data on autism.
THE doctor who sparked the scare over the safety of the MMR vaccine for children changed and misreported results in his research, creating the appearance of a possible link with autism, a Sunday Times investigation has found.
Confidential medical documents and interviews with witnesses have established that Andrew Wakefield manipulated patients’ data, which triggered fears that the MMR triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella was linked to the condition.
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Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.
Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.
Doctor Perri Klass writes For kids' good health, teach them manners
My favorite child-rearing book is "Miss Manners' Guide to Rearing Perfect Children," by Judith Martin, who takes the view that manners are at the heart of the whole parental enterprise. I called her to ask why. "Every infant is born adorable but selfish and the center of the universe," she replied. It's a parent's job to teach that "there are other people, and other people have feelings."
The conversations that every pediatrician has, over and over, about "limit setting" and "consistently praising good behavior" are conversations about manners.
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I like Miss Manners' approach because it lets a parent respect a child's intellectual and emotional privacy: I'm not telling you to like your teacher; I'm telling you to treat her with courtesy. I'm not telling you that you can't hate Tommy; I'm telling you that you can't hit Tommy. Your feelings are your own private business; your behavior is public.
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But that first big counterintuitive lesson - that there are other people out there whose feelings must be considered - affects a child's most basic moral development. For a child, as for an adult, manners represent a strategy for getting along in life, but also a successful intellectual engagement with the business of being human.
I love the graphic by Jillian Tamaki that accompanies the piece in the International Herald Tribune.
Children happy with spirituality
The spiritual lives of children has come under close scrutiny by two different sets of researchers who reached the same conclusion. Spirituality is a good thing for youngsters, a positive influence.
It makes them happier - and healthier.
"Children who were more spiritual were happier," said a University of British Columbia study released Friday, which methodically quantified the typical ups and downs in a young life.
The study, which questioned 320 children from four public schools and two religious schools about their spiritual practices, revealed that happiness was boosted by 26 percent among those children in touch with an "inner belief system."
After catching up on the Internet, here are some articles that caught my eye.
Girls Need a Dad and Boys Need a Mom by Janice Shaw Crouse.
The latest issue of The Journal of Communication and Religion (November 2008, Volume 31, Number 2) contains an excellent analysis of the importance of opposite-sex parent relationships. The common sense conclusion is backed up with social science data and affirmed by a peer-reviewed scholarly article: girls need a dad, and boys need a mom.
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The authors cited numerous studies that link religious beliefs and practices to a strong family unit and noted the fact that the most noticeable impact of religiosity is during adolescence. The majority of studies found an inverse relationship between religiosity and high-risk adolescent behaviors (drinking, drug use, sexual activity, depression, etc.). Other studies indicate a strong relationship between the family's religious belief and practice and a teen's emotional health and family well-being. This is especially true of teenage boys.
While family communication and interaction is critical to high-quality relationships for children and adolescents, this study suggests that the opposite-sex parent is especially important in making children feel validated and encouraged. This is true of boys as well as girls, but it is especially true of daughters. Fathers have the greatest impact on their daughters' vitality as an adolescent college student. Daughters with a strong relationship with their father are more self-confident, self-reliant, and are more successful in school and career than those who have distant or absent father
The nondenominational evangelist group known as the Gideons have given out 76.9 million free Bibles in 85 languages in 187 countries to hotels, hospitals, schools, prisons, and the military. This year the Gideons celebrate 100 years of Bible distribution.
"This is not a church-sponsored, clergy-led effort," said Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group for evangelical churches and organizations. "It's individuals that go around and distribute Bibles. It's an astonishing accomplishment." "What it's done is actually changed our culture. People expect there to be a Bible in a hotel room. There's hardly anything that's parallel to it."
Power of Wilderness Experiences As a Catalyst for Change in Young Offenders.
The researchers monitored the young people’s psychological health before and after the two wilderness trips, as well as during the months in between. At the outset behaviour was described as disruptive, disrespectful and undisciplined. However, as the programme progressed, the frequency of negative events reduced, criminal activity and substance abuse declined and the young people displayed less anti-social behaviour.
Findings of the self-reported measures of self-confidence, trust, belonging and connectedness to nature showed that after each wilderness experience, feelings increased and during the months in between levels fell, as participants had less contact with nature.
No wonder if the City hurts your brain.
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control.
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One of the main forces at work is a stark lack of nature, which is surprisingly beneficial for the brain. Studies have demonstrated, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows, and that women living in public housing are better able to focus when their apartment overlooks a grassy courtyard. Even these fleeting glimpses of nature improve brain performance, it seems, because they provide a mental break from the urban roil.
An atheist, Matthew Parris writes I truly believe Africa needs God.
Now a confirmed atheist, I've become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa: sharply distinct from the work of secular NGOs, government projects and international aid efforts. These alone will not do. Education and training alone will not do. In Africa Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a spiritual transformation. The rebirth is real. The change is good.
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Faith does more than support the missionary; it is also transferred to his flock. This is the effect that matters so immensely, and which I cannot help observing.
First, then, the observation. We had friends who were missionaries, and as a child I stayed often with them; I also stayed, alone with my little brother, in a traditional rural African village. In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them. There was a liveliness, a curiosity, an engagement with the world - a directness in their dealings with others - that seemed to be missing in traditional African life. They stood tall.
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Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent at the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete.
I'm only surprised that this hasn't happened before.
Suit seeks identities of sperm, egg donors.
A B. C. woman conceived through artificial insemination is fighting for the right to know the identity of her biological father, asking the court to make the identities of anonymous donors available.
The legal battle pits the confidentiality promised to those who donated sperm and eggs used for artificial insemination against the rights of children born from such procedures to know their genetic history.
The rights of the children took a step forward this week when a B. C. court ordered doctors to not destroy any related medical records until the end of the case.
In a class-action lawsuit filed last week on behalf of B. C. residents conceived through the use of anonymous sperm, egg and embryo donations -- known as gamete donation -- journalist Olivia Pratten, who is seeking the identity of her biological father, said learning his identity would "alleviate the psychological distress" of not knowing her origins.
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"The child is the one who lives with choices that were made for them before they were born and who bears the consequences of these adult decisions," she said yesterday from her home in New York. "How many times have I spoken about this and doctors tell me to be happy or be grateful --it infuriates me."
Because the report was so embarrassing, the government tried to hide the results. This time it's diapers.
But as any parent knows, Pampers rule
Blow to image of 'green' reusable nappy.
When the government doesn't like the results of a study
A government report that found old-fashioned reusable nappies damage the environment more than disposables has been hushed up because ministers are embarrassed by its findings.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has instructed civil servants not to publicise the conclusions of the £50,000 nappy research project and to adopt a “defensive” stance towards its conclusions.
The report found that using washable nappies, hailed by councils throughout Britain as a key way of saving the planet, have a higher carbon footprint than their disposable equivalents unless parents adopt an extreme approach to laundering them.
Parents who have young girls headed for college should read Lipstick Jungle and consider carefully what environment they want for the daughters.
So a 34 year old widower dropped off his nine children at a Nebraska hospital.
The well-intentioned "safe haven" law has unintended consequences.
The Omaha World-Herald reported that the man had a “history of unemployment, eviction notices and unpaid bills – and a psychologist’s determination that he lacked common sense.”
The children’s grandmother told the World-Herald other family members planned to take care of the children, but the paper said their destination was still uncertain.
In USA Today, Landry said the children were “struggling to varying degrees with what’s happened to them.”
This is the most admirable thing I've ever read about Charles DeGaulle.
The lovely photograph above of Le Général and his youngest daughter comes from an article by Michael Gerson on America's "4-month-old civil rights leader" — Trig's Breakthrough. Mr. Gerson:
The family struggles of political leaders can be morally instructive. Contrast the attitude of Joseph Kennedy with that of Charles de Gaulle, who treated his daughter Anne, born with Down syndrome in 1928, with great affection. The image of this arrogant officer rocking Anne in his arms at night speaks across the years. After her death and burial at age 20, de Gaulle turned to his wife and said, "Come. Now she is like the others."
From the Western Confucian who has collected lots more about the General and his daughter. Via Tea at Trianon
A very interesting article and back story on the pregnancy and delivery of Sarah Palin's infant Trig Paxson Van Palin in the New York Times and just how she balances work and family.
Fusing Politics and Motherhood in New Way
Sarah Palin’s baby shower included a surprise guest: her own baby.
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Most had learned that Ms. Palin was pregnant only a few weeks before. Struggling to accept that her child would be born with Down syndrome and fearful of public criticism of a governor’s pregnancy, Ms. Palin had concealed the news that she was expecting even from her parents and children until her third trimester.
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Ms. Palin’s three-day maternity leave has now become legend among mothers. But aides say she eased back into work, first stopping by her office in Anchorage for a meeting, bringing not only the baby but also her husband to look after him.
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Many high-powered parents separate work and children; Ms. Palin takes a wholly different approach. “She’s the mom and the governor, and they’re not separate,” Ms. Cole said. Around the governor’s offices, it was not uncommon to get on the elevator and discover Piper, smothering her puppy with kisses.
“She’ll be with Piper or Trig, then she’s got a press conference or negotiations about the natural gas pipeline or a bill to sign, and it’s all business,” Ms. Burney, who works across the hall, said. “She just says, ‘Mommy’s got to do this press conference.’ ”
Ms. Palin installed a travel crib in her Anchorage office and a baby swing in her Juneau one. For much of the summer, she carried Trig in a sling as she signed bills and sat through hearings, even nursing him unseen during conference calls.
Todd Palin took a leave from his job as an oil field production operator, and campaign aides said he was doing the same now.
At her baby shower, Ms. Palin joked about her months of secrecy, Ms. Lane said. “About the seventh month I thought I’d better let people know,” Ms. Palin said.
“So it was really great,” she continued. “I was only pregnant a month.”
I bet her husband has been a really big help since he has been on leave from work since the birth.
Hot seat is a gamble for the gonads
Men who enjoy warming their bottom on a heated car seat should beware, for they may also be frying their chances of fatherhood, New Scientist reports in its latest issue.
Sperm production is best when the temperature of the scrotum is one or two degrees Celsius (1.8-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) below the core body temperature of 37 C (99 F).
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The study, led by Andreas Jung at the University of Giessen, did not verify the volunteer's sperm count or sperm mobility, but the researchers fear that only a slight increase in temperature is enough to damage the sperm-production process, the British weekly says.
Previous work in this field has already found that sitting in a car for more than three hours, even on an unheated seat, can impair a man's ability to conceive.
If a mother does not have enough vitamin, neither will the baby she breastfeeds.
Please check, no more babies with rickets.
Vitamin D Deficiency May Lurk in Babies
“I thought I was doing the best thing for her,” said Stephanie Remy-Marquez, of Hyde Park, Mass., after blood tests showed her daughter had no detectable vitamin D. X-ray images of the baby’s wrists and knees showed the edges of the bones and growth plates as blurry and fraying instead of crisp and sharp.
“Breast milk is supposed to be an entire meal, dessert and drinks included,” Ms. Remy-Marquez said. “I thought it was the ultimate cocktail.”
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Physicians have known for more than a century that exclusive breast-feeding may be associated with vitamin D deficiency and rickets, and that the condition is easily prevented and treated with inexpensive vitamin drops or cod liver oil. But doctors are reluctant to say anything that might discourage breast-feeding.
Now some researchers are also linking vitamin D deficiency with other chronic diseases like diabetes, autoimmune disorders and even cancer, and there have been calls to include blood tests of vitamin D levels in routine checkups.
Premature baby 'comes back to life
The 26-year-old mother and her husband have a five-year-old son at home. When she gave birth after going into premature labor at the hospital, the doctor on the scene pronounced it dead and it was taken to the morgue.
The father, Ali Majdub, told Channel 2 that his wife realized the child was alive after asking to see her dead daughter one last time.
"When we unwrapped the baby to see her, she realized it was moving. I began screaming and ran with it toward the doctors," he said.
She was then rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit, where doctors are fighting for her life.
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Dr. Moshe Daniel, the hospital's deputy director, said that in his 35 years as a physician, he had "never heard of such a case. It was like a medical miracle."
.... Daniel speculated that the cooling effect of the morgue slowed the infant's metabolism, causing her oxygen consumption to be very low. There have been rare cases of people who nearly froze under snow "coming back to life," but there have been no reports of babies doing so.
UPDATE:
The little baby has since died
The survival of such an immature baby, whether she was in an incubator or a cooler in the morgue, was very unlikely, said Eidelman. "It was a borderline case," he said, adding that she almost inevitably would have suffered from severe disability if she had lived.
Donnette Sanz, 33, and 7 months pregnant was crossing the street when she was hit by a runaway school bus with no children in it.
"My brakes went out as I was coming from Valentine [Avenue]," van driver Walter Walker, 72, told The Post before cops picked him up. "The light turned red, and I couldn't stop . . . I tried to miss her.
"I tried to go behind her, but she stopped and moved back, and I hit her," he said, holding his head in his hands.
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Within seconds, more than two dozen strangers - from a nearby park, the busy sidewalk and a construction site - poured into the street to aid Sanz.
"Twenty of us started lifting up the bus - about 10 more came to help," said hardhat Madalina Diaz, 42, of Ardsley. "We didn't really communicate, we all just started lifting. We lifted it up and someone pulled her out.
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Sanz was rushed into the St. Barnabas emergency room at 2:18 p.m. She survived the emergency delivery, and died at 4:22 p.m., a spokesman said.
Her baby was taken to the neonatal intensive-care unit and placed on a ventilator.
The baby boy was named Sean Michael
Pregnant Woman Killed by Bus
I had a wonderful time with my family on the Cape, sunny days all except for one when we all went shopping and I made dinner for all 23 of us. In a couple of weeks, I'll post a photo of all of us taken by a professional photographer.
Time away from the computer brought back a different rhythm to daily life. Now that I'm back, so much has happened in the world, I'm spending a lot of time just catching up on the news.
First the Olympics. I did get to see the marvelous spectacle of the opening ceremonies and parade of nations but not without a nagging discomfort at their cost both human and economic
Simon Jenkins articulated it best in Olympic crack in China's wall.
An Olympic Games must be the most expensive public gesture, in billions of dollars a day, that any nation can undertake in peacetime, a political spectacular masquerading as sport.
The IOC was drawn to China as the one big country to which it still had a quid pro quo to offer: international respectability. The IOC knew that China might be induced to spend huge sums, not by virtue of political reform, but to cloak the absence of such reform.
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The IOC seems to have found in Chinese communism a shared language and nostalgia for the drilled utopianism of the mid-20th century. A large area of old Beijing has been razed and rebuilt with stadiums, office blocks and avenues, monuments to the modernising zeal of the party. Morally emasculated western architects have lined up for work, led by the son of Albert Speer as master planner.
Above all the Chinese have proved that the Olympics are about control. Lose control, as did the world torch tour and its “1,000 jogging policemen”, and you cannot deliver concord and good publicity. Instead, control has required the Chinese to arrest untold hundreds of human rights activists. It has rendered Tibet virtually inaccessible. Anyone concerned with protest, such as the signers of a letter pleading for “an Olympic spirit” in human rights, has been thrown in jail or removed from the capital; 100,000 troops have been brought in to ring the city.
Still, the Olympics always bring stories of courage, determination, persistence, hardship and glory. My favorite so far is the story of Lomong.
Where Once He Was Lost, Now He is Found
For seven years, China has dreamed of orchestrating every detail, athletic and political, of its glorious Opening Ceremonies to the Olympics. Now, one lean 1,500-meter runner from the United States, chosen by his teammates in an act of open defiance, may steal the show. Lopez Lomong, one of the Sudanese "Lost Boys" and a member of the anti-genocide group Team Darfur, has been chosen by his 595 U.S. Olympic teammates to carry our flag on Friday. What, we couldn't find a Tibetan monk on the team?
What a coincidence. Just hours before U.S. team captains met to decide on the flag carrier, Chinese officials rescinded the visa of Joey Cheek, a speedskating gold medalist who carried the U.S. flag at the Closing Ceremonies at the 2006 Winter Games and later co-founded Team Darfur. After that slap at Cheek, U.S. athletes here had almost nothing to say on the topic. One even referred to the subject as "the question they warned us about."
Perhaps they didn't answer individually. But the entire U.S. team gave its answer -- as a group and in capital letters -- with Lomong's selection. You jerk Cheek's visa. We put Lomong in your face. And do it proudly.
Here's the backstory of his foster parents who took in seven lost boys from Sudan, extraordinary people, ordinary Americans.
U.S. Flagbearer found new life in New York foster home.
When he learned he was coming to America, Lomong thought he would have to get a job and support himself. He didn't expect to have such supportive parents.
"I just thought they would just keep me for a little while, but they convinced me that this is your home," he said.
Anthony, 20, is a junior political science major at State University at Buffalo, where he plays soccer. In his first six weeks in America, Anthony went to Disney World, Washington, D.C., and Boston. He surprised the Rogerses when he told them the most amazing thing he had seen in America: "parents."
Gregg Easterbrook reports on the study that TV Really Might Cause Autism.
Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3.
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The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate. "We are not saying we have found the cause of autism, we're saying we have found a critical piece of evidence," Cornell researcher Michael Waldman told me.
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If television viewing by toddlers is a factor in autism, the parents of afflicted children should not reproach themselves, as there was no warning of this risk. Now there is: The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends against any TV for children under the age of 2. Waldman thinks that until more is known about what triggers autism, families with children under the age of 3 should get them away from the television and keep them away.
I laughed out loud at the 20 Baby Products Great for Traumatizing Infants.
While this is not surprising to any parent, scientists have now used MRIs to show that the sight of a baby's face sends a rush of blood to the brain's pleasure center, similar to the sense of elation that sex, drugs and other addictive behaviors bring.
The researchers' findings should come as no surprise to most parents, such as one of the study's subjects, Katrina Lyons, who can't get enough of the sight of her two son's beaming faces, and has photos of her children all over the house. "It's got to be like crack," she says. "I just have to see them everywhere."
Birth control and sex education does no good for teen-age girls who want to get pregnant.
Girls know how to get pregnant. Why do they choose to do so is the question.
In Planned Teen Parenthood, Daniel Moloney quotes research of sociologists who spent five years living in the same neighborhoods with poor unwed mothers.
While the poor women we interviewed saw marriage as a luxury, something they aspired to but feared they might never achieve, they judged children to be a necessity, an absolutely essential part of a young woman’s life, the chief source of identity and meaning.
Moloney points out that providing contraception to teenagers without their parental consent or notification not only is common practice at high schools but totally counter-productive.
These girls need more parental involvement, not less. These young girls know how to have babies, so further sex ed isn’t needed. They want to have babies, so contraception is beside the point. The problem is that they think that they are ready to have babies, and they aren’t.
That’s where the parents should be stepping in, helping the girls to realize that they aren’t ready to be mothers...
Studies show that teens are less likely to have sex if they think their parents disapprove. But parents are often kept in the dark, thanks to misbegotten health care policies which view them as a threat to their daughter’s best interests.
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Our nation’s “experts” are spectacularly ill-equipped to deal with teenage girls who want to be mothers. Indeed, laws designed to make contraceptives available to teenagers often make the problem worse.
Having lived in beautiful Gloucester for several years, I was even more interested in the story of the Gloucester girls 16 and younger becoming pregnant so they could raise their babies together.
In Pregnancy Boom at Gloucester High, Time magazine said
The high school has done perhaps too good a job of embracing young mothers. Sex-ed classes end freshman year at Gloucester, where teen parents are encouraged to take their children to a free on-site day-care center. Strollers mingle seamlessly in school hallways among cheerleaders and junior ROTC. "We're proud to help the mothers stay in school," says Sue Todd, CEO of Pathways for Children, which runs the day-care center.
Clearly access to contraception will do nothing to prevent young girls who want to become pregnant.
Kay Hymowitz in Gloucester Girls Gone Wild writes
But the story could have one upside: it might expose the folly of much of what has passed for wisdom about teen pregnancy. I say might because so far the media seems to be having trouble grasping what happened in this old, largely Catholic fishing town.
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übersocialized middle-class experts, journalists, and policy makers aren’t addressing the fact that girls tend to like babies. In most cultures in human history, 15- or 16-year-olds were seen as viable mothers (only after being married off, of course), so biological urge coincided with social need.
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In the past, the problem was held at bay by a combination of sexual reticence, social disapproval, and a no-baby-without-marriage rule, since it wasn’t easy to find a presentable boy ready to sign on to a life sentence at 16. No more. Sexual reticence is now deemed something on the order of a Victorian perversion. Social disapproval? Nowhere evident. The Gloucester school’s superintendent found that most townspeople greeted with a yawn the news that local teen pregnancy rates were soaring,
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Then there’s the point compellingly made by Kathleen Parker in her new book Save the Males: Americans aren’t all that keen on fathers these days. A girl eyeing her cousin’s cute little baby girl used to believe that she had to find a husband before she could have one of her own. Now, she can bypass the husband problem and just spend a little leisure time with the homeless guy on Main Street. Who cares if Dad is an addict or a tramp? They’re all bums—or jerks—anyway
What is so distressing is the poverty-stricken future that lies ahead for these girls and their children. The 'unmarriage' revolution that Kay Hymowitz writes of in her book does more to contribute to the growing inequality in America than anything else.
The increase in single mothers raising children is not just a problem in Gloucester. Intact families with mothers and fathers raising children is the most important element in a sound society with a hopeful future for all. Sadly, it's the least educated girls, thirsting to be loved, who become prey for older, unscrupulous males, seduced into believing that sex equals love.
The battle to point to an alternative way of living -
sexual self-control, resilience against passing temptations, better avenues of communication, a wider range of interests, and, ultimately, the ability to make a complete gift of self to another in marriage -
is being lost when the ACLU and Planned Parenthood have teamed up
in an aggressive campaign over the past several years—a campaign to pressure states to eliminate abstinence education and to reject federal funding for these programs. .... The goal is to get enough states to refuse the federal abstinence-education funding to the point where the ACLU and Planned Parenthood can convince Congress to eliminate such funding entirely.
All this is happening, by the way, as fresh reports arrive almost every month about the benefits of teen abstinence and the effectiveness of abstinence programs.
To all fathers who are raising children in the most important job a man can do, my appreciation and a Happy Father's Day.
Juan Williams tells us just how important in The Tragedy of America's Disappearing Fathers.
As we celebrate Father's Day tomorrow, we should reflect upon a sad fact: It is now common to meet young people in our big city schools, foster-care homes and juvenile centers who do not know their dads. Most of those children have come face-to-face with their father at some point; but most have little regular contact with the man, or have any faith that he loves or cares about them.
When fatherless young people are encouraged to write about their lives, they tell heartbreaking stories about feeling like "throwaway people." In the privacy of the written page, their hard, emotional shells crack open to reveal the uncertainty that comes from not knowing if their father has any interest in them. The stories are like letters to unknown dads – some filled with imaginary scenes about what it might be like to have a dad who comes home and puts his arm around you or plays with you.
They feel like they've been thrown away, Mr. Myers says, because "they don't have a father to push them, discipline them, and they give up trying to succeed . . . they don't see themselves as wanted." A regular theme of their stories is that they feel safer in a foster care home or juvenile detention center than on the outside, because they have no father to hold together the family. There is no one at home
Those who had a father around remember the lessons learned from our fathers.
collected by The Art of Manliness which should be mandatory reading for those lost boys with absent or unknown fathers who must imagine what being a man is about and father themselves.
The truest happiness is in self sacrifice in love like this father, Dick Hoyt, in Team Hoyt Absolutely amazing love story between father and son.
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In the 1950s, disabled children often disappeared into state institutions. Now one family seeks its lost son
Claire Ansberry tells What Happened to Ricky in the Wall St. Journal, a story with a happy ending.
The working parents' search for child care has to be one of the most difficult choices given how reluctant most states have been in releasing their reports on the web.
At last, inspections made by state regulators of child-care centers of their safety, quality and cleanliness can now be found online reports
Sue Shellenbarger in the Wall Street Journal
Some 20 of 50 states have begun posting the records online and 13 more have plans to do so.
A new generation of Web-savvy parents has been pushing for such information. A Michigan official says one staffer was "totally buried" in written child-care inquiries before it posted data online. Angie's List, a clearinghouse of service ratings, began posting child-care reviews in December 2006 "because our members wanted it," a spokeswoman says.
Links to state regulators' Web sites for child-care safety, quality and health information:
Arizona
Arkansas
Colorado
Florida
Georgia
Indiana
Michigan
Nebraska
New Hampshire
New York State
New York City
North Carolina
North Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
South Carolina
Texas
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
Pregnancy used to be something camouflaged and endured, nine months of achy backs and euphemisms and elastic waistbands with a 7-pound 9-ounce reward at the end.
Not anymore. For a certain kind of mom with a certain kind of priority, pregnancy is a heady blur of spa visits and personal pregnancy chefs, of baby planners and "babymoons." Pregnancy is not a journey. Pregnancy is a destination, a showplace.
Greater Expectation: Luxury Services for Pregnant Women are Booming
The consequences of growing up the daughter of the trail-blazing feminist and author Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple left Rebecca Walker lonely, ambivalent, and very confused with her longing to be a mother.
She was taught that motherhood was a form of servitude and the worst thing that could happen to a woman.
When I hit my 20s and first felt a longing to be a mother, I was totally confused. I could feel my biological clock ticking, but I felt if I listened to it, I would be betraying my mother and all she had taught me.
How my mother's fanatical feminist views tore us apart.
I know many women are shocked by my views. They expect the daughter of Alice Walker to deliver a very different message. Yes, feminism has undoubtedly given women opportunities. It's helped open the doors for us at schools, universities and in the workplace. But what about the problems it's caused for my contemporaries?
The ease with which people can get divorced these days doesn't take into account the toll on children. That's all part of the unfinished business of feminism.
Then there is the issue of not having children. Even now, I meet women in their 30s who are ambivalent about having a family. They say things like: 'I'd like a child. If it happens, it happens.' I tell them: 'Go home and get on with it because your window of opportunity is very small.' As I know only too well.
Then I meet women in their 40s who are devastated because they spent two decades working on a PhD or becoming a partner in a law firm, and they missed out on having a family. Thanks to the feminist movement, they discounted their biological clocks. They've missed the opportunity and they're bereft.
Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating.
She's her own woman now, blessed to be a mom and soon-to-published author of Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence.
How a teen-ager feels about himself is the best indicator of his future social functioning.
Revenge of the Nerds: Most Geeks Well-Adjusted
Kathleen Boykin McElhaney, lead study investigator and research associate in psychology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,
"I think our study shows that popularity doesn't really matter a whole heck of a lot," McElhaney said. "Our data suggests that finding a social niche and a place where you can be comfortable being yourself is most important."
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 – untampered with biological origins – in particular, a right to be conceived from an untampered-with-sperm from one, living, adult, identified man and an untampered-with-ovum from one, living, adult, identified woman.
In Germany, a doctor has been ordered to pay monthly child support of 600 euros because he prescribed a contraceptive device that failed.
Doctor to pay for unwanted baby.
And we thought American courts were bad. Thank goodness, some Germans find this nuts.
The decision in Karlsruhe, made on Tuesday, has met with disapproval in the German press.
The conservative Die Welt said the whole idea of damages being paid for the birth of a child was "perverse": "In addition to the highly private inkling that he was not wanted by his parents, he now has official confirmation that he was born by mistake," it said.
via Medpundit
When I read that Michael Jackson named his three children, Paris Prince, and Blanket, I wondered what sort of father would name his child "Blanket", forgetting that this was Michael Jackson after all, but then I didn't know about name abuse.
Madeline Bunting writes a provocative column on "anti-adulthood", the latest and pernicious way of marketing to children.
She argued that marketing to children has boomed over the past decade, and its content has been characterised by anti-adultism. Cool is of the ultimate symbolic importance, and what is cool is usually anti-adult, oppositional, rebellious. Adults are never cool - they are boring, often absurd, sometimes stupid - and when they try to be cool they are pathetic. Even popular cartoons such as Rugrats are aping the format. The universe conjured up is one of "kids rule", in which children are "empowered into an adult-free space".
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Why listen to your parents when they are so uncool? Meanwhile, for the child the evidence of failing, frustrated parents gives the cruel edge of experience to those lighthearted comedy sketches of incompetent adults.
Even more worrying, the experience instils in children a powerful uncertainty about whether adulthood is a desirable state to achieve at all.
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the much more important question is the state of adulthood. Why are parents of this generation so uncomfortable about projecting the kind of authoritative certainty of adulthood with which many of us grew up, and against which we framed our own sense of identity?
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We need to be able to answer the question of what is successful adulthood
HT Normblog.
If you wonder how working Moms get it all done, some of them have a secret they don't talk about.
Working Mothers Find Some Peace on the Road.
Hers is the guilty pleasure of the traveling working mom. After slogging through airports, sitting through PowerPoints and networking through lunches, there is, at the end of the day, a small taste of freedom. And as hard as it can be to balance the demands of business trips and family life, for the relatively small group of employed mothers who travel, it can be delicious.
No chores to tackle. No homework to oversee. No bedtimes to bird-dog. For many working mothers, business trips become mini-vacations. The simple pleasure of unbroken sleep and an uninterrupted meal can feel like an indulgent getaway for these women burdened at both ends.
The ethical dilemmas in caring for children with profound developmental disabilities in this brave new world are new and unparalleled. I've never heard of such treatment, yet, it makes sense.
Young disabled girl 'kept small'.
In a report published in a medical journal this month, the doctors described a six-year-old girl with profound, irreversible developmental disability who was given high doses of estrogen to permanently halt her growth so that her parents could continue to care for her at home.
The controversial growth-attenuation treatment, which included hysterectomy, was requested by the child's parents and initiated after careful consultation and review by an ethics committee.
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For children with severe combined neurologic and cognitive impairment who are unable to move without assistance, all the necessities of life – dressing, bathing, transporting – must be provided by caregivers, usually parents, and these tasks become increasing difficult, if not impossible, as the child increases in size.
"Achieving permanent growth attenuation while the child is still young and of manageable size would remove one of the major obstacles to family care and might extend the time that parents with the ability, resources, and inclination to care for their child at home might be able to do so," the doctors wrote.
The parents of the six-year-old, both of whom were university-educated professionals, indicated a strong desire to continue caring for their daughter.
Despite having the neurologic development no greater than that of an infant, the six-year-old responded to her parents and two healthy siblings – vocalising and smiling in response to care and affection – and "clearly is an integral, and much loved, member of the family," the authors said.
After extensive evaluation, the combined opinion of a team of specialists was that the child would have no significant neurologic or cognitive improvements.
The onset of puberty and continued growth caused concern in the parents about how they would care for their daughter long-term, which they clearly wanted to do.
They were concerned about having to turn over care to "strangers" and also about the complications that would arise when the child started menstruating.
Hey, you guys, if you want to be a father, get off the phone.
Men who use mobile phones face increased risk of infertility.
A new study shows a worrying link between poor sperm and the number of hours a day that a man uses his mobile phone.
Those who made calls on a mobile phone for more than four hours a day had the worst sperm counts and the poorest quality sperm, according to results released yest at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine annual meeting in New Orleans.
Doctors believe the damage could be caused by the electromagnetic radiation emitted by handsets or the heat they generate.
Be very careful about any products you use that contain hormones because you might be the cause of pre-school puberty in your children.
Like the father who used a testosterone skin cream that was determined to be the cause of the onset of puberty to his two pre-school children who developed pubic hair and enlarged genitals.
Don't let your boys use shampoos containing lavender or tea tree oils because their breasts might enlarge.
Preschool Puberty and a Search for the Causes.
Could TV be the cause of the increasing rates of autism?
Gregg Easterbrook discusses the findings from a recent Cornell study on Slate in TV Really Might Cause Autism.
Last month, I speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.
Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3.
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Everyone complains about television in a general way. But if it turns out television has specific harmful medical effects—in addition to these new findings about autism, some studies have linked television viewing by children younger than 3 to the onset of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—parents may urgently need to know to keep toddlers away from the TV.
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If screen images cause harm to brain development in the young, the proliferation of these TV-like devices may bode ill for the future. The aggressive marketing of Teletubbies, Baby Einstein videos, and similar products intended to encourage television watching by toddlers may turn out to have been a nightmarish mistake.
If I were the parent of a baby, I'd be very concerned. The relationship between television viewing and autism and ADD seems quite strong.
From the American Academy of Pediatrics, what children really need for healthy development is more old-fashioned playtime.
Numerous studies have shown that unstructured play has many benefits. It can help children become creative, discover their own passions, develop problem-solving skills and relate to others, the academy report says.
"Perhaps above all, play is a simple joy that is a cherished part of childhood," says the report, prepared by two academy committees for release today at the group's annual meeting in Atlanta.
A lack of spontaneous playtime can create stress for children and parents alike.
You've heard it said that breastfeeding babies makes them smarter. It's not the milk but the mothers that make them smarter.
In and of itself, breast milk does not boost IQ.
Researchers found breastfeeding mothers tended to be more intelligent, more highly educated, and likely to provide a more stimulating home environment.
What do you do when your nation is in the midst of demographic collapse ?
Via Tinkertytonk's Go Forth and Multiply, I learned
One Russian provincial governor gives workers the afternoon off to go home and make a baby.
If you're lucky and your baby is born on June 12, Russia's Independence Day, you've given birth to a patriot and all sorts of prizes await.
In London, a group of renowned psychologists, academics, teachers and authors say that action is needed now in order to prevent the death of childhood.
Junk food, TV and the Internet are poisoning childhood
The 110-strong lobby group wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph asking that the Government intervene before children suffer irretrievable psychological and physical damage.
They say politicians have failed to appreciate how damaging the modern world has become to children's development.
They wrote: "We are deeply concerned at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children's behavioural and developmental conditions
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Studies found that cognitive skills in 11-year-olds were two to three years behind the average levels of 15 years ago.
Some women who want a child resort to sperm from anonymous donors with little thought as to how the lives of their children will be effected.
What seemed to be an easy answer for the mother has created a complex "life debt" for the children, burdening them in unexpected ways as they struggle to make sense of their genetic heritage.
Buffalo Girl, herself donor-conceived, gives voice to the complex personal narratives of such children.
How would you feel having 45+ unknown half-siblings.
the more dispersed your genetic kin the more extraordinary the numbers of them, the more confused, overwhelmed, alienated and experimental your life feels.
Donor as Genetic Parent
From Wendy Kramer, founder of the Donor Sibling Registry
I am afraid that a child brought up being told that their donor did nothing more than donate a "cell" may not fee fully able to express their own true thoughts, curiosities and feelings on the matter.
We have also heard story after story of donor conceived kids and adults connecting with their donor relatives, either half siblings or donors, and it being a profound and meaningful experience. These people are definitely acknowledging avery important genetic bond. Please parents, allow your kids to decide for themselves. Please do not set it up that somehow they will think they are hurting or betraying you to be curious about or value this genetic piece of themselves.
Living with the Pain of Not Knowing.
Katrina: "I don't have a dad and I never will."
Steve Chenevy: "Prices daughter, Katrina is now 17."
Katrina: "..and there is a lot of anger involved….I don't support anonymous donations for several reasons. First and foremost is the mental health of the offspring." "I don't understand the concept of a dad ....
`Everybody said, `enjoy every minute of it, it goes by really quick,' " he says of raising a family. ``Now all of a sudden, we have no one in the house. You have melancholy feelings about it, no question. Time does not stand still."
Dads who did the home work now face the sorrows of an empty nest
When the Hutu militias came to his front door in Kigali, Rwanda, Damascene held them off so his pregnant wife could escape out the back door with his young three-year old son Derrick.
As Jeanne fled she saw her husband being beaten and she didn't know if he had been killed. All she could do was save the children.
Two weeks later, she was in Brussels and a week after that she gave birth.
Damascene lost all 11 brothers and sisters, his parents and 140 others from his extended family. He thought he lost his wife too.
Damascene fled through Africa to Indonesia, than to East Timor, then to Darwin, Australia where he told immigration officials his passport was forged. They locked him up; he was safe.
He reached Darwin in 2001, was released from Villawood as a temporary resident in 2002 and granted permanent Australian residency last year. He had not given up hope and sought Red Cross help to find his family.
They finally found her in Brussels. He flew to her in February. "Thank God, you're safe," he said. And: "Why didn't you find someone else?"
"Because I never gave up hope. And I could see you in your son's face." He replied: "Thank you. Thank God."
When Cutting Isn't Cruel
Our mutilation of girls may be killing them. Our mutilation of boys may be saving their lives.
Two girls, fraternal twins, were separated, then abandoned a week apart on the same spot on a sidewalk in China.
The Funk family in Illinois adopted one and named her Mia; a year later, the Ramirez family in Florida adopted the other and named her Mia.
Thanks to a website and DNA tests, the two adopted girls, twins, met for the first time.
Separated at birth, united by chance
The girls, whose parents had dressed them identically in Chinese-themed outfits, shyly surveyed each other. Urged a little closer, they finally reached for each other's hand.
"I'm just awed," Holly Funk said as she looked at the tiny girls, a little island in the flow of travelers crowding the luggage claim area. "Grateful to God. To me, it's a divine thing. It's a miracle. In the sea of humanity, these kids found each other."
They thought she was lying about giving birth to her three children because the DNA didn't match. Then, they found she's her own twin.
"In her blood, she was one person, but in other tissues, she had evidence of being a fusion of two individuals," Uhl said.
It's a rare condition called chimerism, with only 30 documented cases worldwide. In Greek mythology, "chimera" means a monster: part goat, part lion, part snake.
In human biology, a chimera is an organism with at least two genetically distinct types of cells -- or, in other words, someone meant to be a twin. But while in the mother's womb, two fertilized eggs fuse, becoming one fetus that carries two distinct genetic codes -- two separate strands of DNA.
The twin is invisible, but for chimeras the twin lives microscopically inside the body as DNA.
When Uhl told Keegan she was her own twin, Keegan said she was shocked. "You wouldn't imagine that that could even be possible."
Two lesbians married in Vermont in 200 and had a child by artificial insemination. Let's call them Anna and Susan.
Anna, the biological mother, renounced her homosexuality and taking the child with her, moved to Virginia where she won custody in the Virginia courts.
Susan brought suit in Vermont where the family court gave Susan custody and the Vermont State Supreme Court ruled that Vermont has exclusive jurisdiction.
So who's most closely following the twists and turns of this jurisdictional battle? Fathers, who after divorce, lost custody battles against "moveaway" petitions filed by their ex-wives.
Even if you have children, most of your adult life will be spent without them.
Life Without Children
"Demographically, socially and culturally, the nation is shifting from a society of childrearing families to a society of child-free adults. The percentage of households with children has declined from half of all households in 1960 to less than one-third today, the lowest percentage in the nation's history," according to a study by the National Marriage Project (NMP) at Rutgers University.
This change in America has gone virtually unnoticed and undocumented. Thirty-six years ago, 62 percent of an adult's life was spent with a spouse and children, the highest in history. By 1985, that dropped to 43 percent, the lowest in history.
It's hard to imagine but a husband and wife arrested in the British terror raids planned to take their six month old baby with them on their suicide mission to bomb planes in mid air. Their baby's bottle would have hidden the liquid bomb.
Just in case you wondered how far the anti-life ideology of the islamo terrorists would go.
With his parents in jail, I hope that the poor baby will be placed in a good foster home with a chance at a normal life
UPDATE: Dr. Sanity says we have moved into a time beyond wisdom and points to a discussion she calls heart-breaking and she's right at Blackfive, On the virtues of killing children.
You'd be surprised at some of your ancestors.
Star is Descended from Kings. Of Course, Most People Are
Even without a documented connection to a notable forebear, experts say, the odds are virtually 100 percent that every person on Earth is descended from one royal personage or another.
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Muhammad, the founder of Islam, appears on the family tree of every person in the Western world.
Two good, short videos from around the Web for a Friday afternoon
9 months of gestation in 20 seconds at Google Video
Together Can Dick and Rick Hoyt, a remarkable father-son team runs marathons and triatholons. Son Rick's cerebral palsy made him a mute quadriplegic still he joined forces with his dad.
I wondered why there were so many girls in my family.
Beautiful people tend to have girls say scientists or as my feminist friends say, baby women.
According to research, attractive parents are 26% more likely to have a daughter than a son as their first child. It is an inexorable process that has resulted in women becoming increasingly more attractive than men.
This is because of differing “evolutionary strategies” that each sex has adopted to survive, claim researchers at the London School of Economics.
If you want to get pregnant, lay off the funny stuff.
Marijuana May Sabotage Pregnancy.
You now can buy fresh embryos to fit your requirements, say blond hair, blue eyes, PHd material, at the Abraham Center for Life in San Antonio. Ethical row ensues
The world's first human embryo bank has been launched offering 'bespoke babies' for infertile couples.
For around £5,000 couples can buy ready-made embryos matched to their specific requirements - even down to choosing what eye and hair colour they would like their child to have.
In each case the embryos are made from eggs and sperm from two donors who have never even met. The moment of conception occurs in the laboratory and is determined by the genetic combination the clinic thinks will best meet the needs of the paying couples on its books.
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The Center Director, Jennalee Ryan is quoted
But what I say to them is Jesus was not conceived in the normal way either. I don't lose any sleep over what we are doing. I feel what we are doing is positive.
"We are helping couples and putting good genes back into the universe."
But Josephine Quintavalle of the UK campaigning group Comment on Reproductive Ethics said it amounted to the "absolute commercialisation of human life."
She said: "It is heartbreaking to see children reduced in this way to the equivalent of a special offer supermarket commodity. Cut price, tailor-made human embryos, complete with door to door delivery."
The case against parental surveillance devices. Big Mother is Watching
Now, the obvious danger of such devices is that they raise paranoid parenting to an even more extreme level, thereby further depriving children of the chance to test their capacity for independence.
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The more subtle, but equally important, objection to spyware is that it isn't good for parents either. By making snooping relatively impersonal, these technologies prompt mothers and fathers to bypass important moral questions about their relationship with their children. If it's all right to scrutinize your daughter's text messages, then it should be OK to read her diary. If it's all right to electronically monitor her driving, then it should be equally kosher to get in to your own car and follow her. Yet there are good reasons most sane adults would balk at these low-tech invasions of their children's privacy.
No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children's outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they're robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we're on our way to creating a nation of wimps
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A small percentage of children seem almost invulnerable to anxiety from the start. But the overwhelming majority of kids are somewhere in between. For them, overparenting can program the nervous system to create lifelong vulnerability to anxiety and depression.
There is in these studies a lesson for all parents. Those who allow their kids to find a way to deal with life's day-to-day stresses by themselves are helping them develop resilience and coping strategies.
A professor of mathematics in the U.K. has worked out an equation to calculate how long into a car journey it takes a child to ask: "Are we nearly there yet?"
I'll let the Scotsman deliver the equation.
How parents interact with their kids has a great deal of influence of the quality of their children's future romantic lives, even more than their peers!
Reports Sue Shellenbarger in the Wall Street Journal
Having divorced parents has been linked in research by Paul Amato, a Pennsylvania State University sociology professor, and others to a 50% to 100% higher probability of divorce among children. Now, plying observational techniques previously used only to study adult marriages, scientists have been able to tease out the mechanisms by which specific parental behaviors affect kids. These studies suggest it is how parents relate to their children that has the most direct impact, regardless of the marital bliss -- or lack of it -- in the parents' marriages.
The large influence of the parent-child interactions on a child's romantic relationships "surprises people constantly," says W. Andrew Collins, a professor in the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development, and lead researcher on a 30-year study of the subject. Although peers and other factors play a role, "where the rubber really meets the road" in shaping future relationships "is the way the parent treats the child and relates with the child. That's the laboratory in which the child learns how to relate lovingly with other people."
Among the most influential factors: whether parents teach kids to resolve conflicts well; whether they're warm and nurturing; whether they show interest in teens' activities and set good limits and appropriate parent-child role boundaries; and whether they avoid fostering feelings of rejection in their kids.
The best way to teach your children about money is to tell family stories that illustrate the money lessons you think are most important.
Jonathan Clements in the Wall St Journal says telling stories really worked in his family. Every one of his siblings is incredibly careful about money because they heard the stories of the maternal grandfather who inherited millions of dollars and how he spent it all, spending his last days working as a part-time gardener to pay the bills.
We all have parents or grandparents who lived through the Depression and they can tell us a few stories and they probably have.
Clements has some pointers.
Choose your stories carefully and embellish them a bit.
Set a good example
Frequent short stories beat long discussions
The Best Way to Teach Kids About Money (subscribers only)
Are we moving towards a higher view of motherhood, one that embraces a variety of ways of being a mother? Can we go from Me to We?
Motherpie rises above the either-or debate of motherhood in Whole Mothers.
Can those on either side of the "Mommy wars" rise with her or will they continue to throw insults and taunt those who make different choices?
I'll listen to just about anyone but... Me, I have big difficulties with Linda Hirshman who lays all the faults of society to women who didn't stick it out at work once they had children.
Suzanne Cooper, 36, was induced for 6 days before giving birth to a baby boy at 6 am on 6/06/06 weighing 6 lbs, 6 oz.
So she names the poor baby Damien, after the child in the movie The Omen, the remake of which debuted on the same day.
But wasn't Damien the anti-Christ?
There is Father Damien of course, a Catholic missionary who cared for the lepers on a remote Hawaiian island and who also died of leprosy and who is awaiting elevation to sainthood.
Still, it seems an awful lot of baggage for the poor kid.
Sigmund, Carl and Alfred, now represented by a sole blogger, reprints "A Nation of Wimps" from Psychology Today that should be required reading for all parents.
Summary: Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they're breaking down in record numbers.
It's great reading, take for example, the corruption of playtime, the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus, parental hovering causing acute anxiety, the endless adolescence all making kids risk-averse, psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety.
There's enormous power in words.
It's no surprise that verbally abusing a child -belittling, shaming or threatening - can contribute to depression and anxiety that can plague the adult for years.
Now, a study of more than 5600 people, aged 15-54, offers evidence.
"Those who were verbally abused had 1.6 times as many symptoms of depression and anxiety as those who had not been verbally abused and were twice as likely to have suffered a mood or anxiety disorder in their lifetime," study author Natalie Sachs-Ericsson, an FSU professor, said in a prepared statement.
Words as Powerful at Sticks and Stones.
From Gifts of Motherhood in the Washington Post.
Before Michele Booth Cole walked her two daughters inside the Toys R Us that December morning two years ago, she made herself clear. They were there to buy a Christmas gift for a little girl at Mommy's job whose own mommy and daddy couldn't afford to get one, she explained to 5-year-old Grace and 3-year-old Madison.
"You will get gifts later on, but we're not getting anything for you. Do you understand?" The girls nodded. "Are you going to be okay?" They nodded again. "And we're not going to ask for anything," Cole stressed. More vigorous nodding.
They combed the colorful aisles of the huge Langley Park store, and the girls couldn't resist pointing to all the toys they liked but were careful not to ask for. They found the Bratz doll from the other little girl's wish list and stood in line. They looked at the games and dolls and dressy feather boas one more time. Hard to leave it all behind, but they did without a fuss, Cole recalls.
It was a small moment to reflect on sharing and selflessness, she says.
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Part of good mothering "is to teach your children about the entire society, not just your own microcosm neighborhood of 10 square blocks,"
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"Your heart doesn't have this limited, finite capacity," Cole says. "It has unlimited capacity, and you find out the more you share, the more you are able to do."
Now that's a good Mom.
Newsweek calls it The Fine Art of Letting Go. Can Boomers do it?
Let their children live their own lives?
Most boomers don't want to be "helicopter parents," hovering so long that their offspring never get a chance to grow up
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Alarmed by these intrusions into what should be a period of increasing independence, colleges around the country have set up parent-liaison offices to limit angry phone calls to professors and deans. Parent orientations, usually held alongside the student sessions, teach how to step aside.
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Letting go is the final frontier for boomer parents, who've made child rearing a major focus of their adult lives.
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Try the quiz to see if you're a helicopter parent.
You're probably not if you remember the goal is not to raise a child, but to raise an adult
Glenn Reynolds says the fun has gone out of parenting even as the costs of raising a middle class child till age 18 is now $200,000 and that doesn't include the costs of college!
The Parent Trap
Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting "experts" and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what's amazing isn't that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all.
The Real Live Preacher thought he was over Mr. Rogers
Damn. She caught me, so I went ahead and put my hand under my glasses and wiped away the tears. I don’t like people seeing me cry. When I thought I was under control, I talked about Mr. Rogers some more.
I told her how speaking into the camera was his idea. He wanted to talk to children. I said that there were probably a lot of people out there who grew up pretending that Mr. Rogers was their dad. Some kids don’t have any grownups in their lives who will talk to them like that. I told her about the Emmy he won and how the audience grew quiet when he stepped to the microphone
I wonder how many people pretended Mr. Rogers was their dad, how many boys and girls learned important lessons, about being genuine and kind, from him. Always gentle, always courteous, always a role model.
I came across this absolutely wonderful piece by Tom Junod who wrote about Mr.Rogers -- somehow I just can't call him Fred. Can You Say...Hero? was his eulogy to Mr. Rogers, published in Esquire in 1998.
When Mr. Rogers accepted the Emmy for Lifetime Achievement, Junod writes
he went onstage to accept Emmy's Lifetime Achievement Award, and there, in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, "All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….Ten seconds of silence." And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, "I'll watch the time," and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn't kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked…and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds…and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, "May God be with you" to all his vanquished children.
Another snippet from Tom Junod's Can You Say ...Hero? that had me crying by the end.
ONCE UPON A TIME, Mister Rogers went to New York City and got caught in the rain. He didn't have an umbrella, and he couldn't find a taxi, either, so he ducked with a friend into the subway and got on one of the trains. It was late in the day, and the train was crowded with children who were going home from school. Though of all races, the schoolchildren were mostly black and Latino, and they didn't even approach Mister Rogers and ask him for his autograph. They just sang. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" and turned the clattering train into a single soft, runaway choir.
I am so happy that my friend Bob Berks, has been commissioned to create a sculpture of Mr. Rogers which I saw underway last summer. Bob Berks is the American sculptor whose "Biographies in Bronze" encompass some 300 portraits. You can see some of them at his official website including videos, made by his talented wife Tod, where Bob talks about sculpting the Albert Einstein now on the grounds of the National Academy of Sciences, Frank Sinatra and his quartet of Lincoln sculptures, one of which I gaze on every day on my desk, one of my most treasured possessions. I just know that his sculpture of Mr. Rogers will be treasured by millions who have a special place in their heart for that man who helped love them into being.
Is the drop in teen-age pregnancy attributable to education or is it the decreased fertility of boys?
Pesticides with estrogen-like effects have the strongest evidence for sperm reduction.
Liza Mundy writes in Sperm counts and teen pregnancy rates
The great sperm-count debate began in 1992, when a group of Danish scientist published a study suggesting that sperm counts declined globally by about 1 percent a year between 1938 and 1990. This study postulated that "environmental influences," particularly widely used chemical compounds with an impact like that of the female hormone estrogen, might be contributing to a drop in fertility among males. If true, this was obviously an alarming development, particularly given that human sperm counts are already strikingly low compared to almost any other species. "Humans have the worst sperm except for gorillas and ganders of any animal on the planet,"
At a conference at Stanford
the evidence presented are several trends that seem to point to a subtle feminization of male babies: a worldwide rise in hypospadias, a birth defect in which the urethral opening is located on the shaft of the penis rather than at the tip; a rise in cryptorchidism, or undescended testicles; and experiments Swan has done showing that in male babies with high exposure to compounds called phthalates, something called the anogenital distance is decreasing. If you measure the distance from a baby's anus to the genitals, the distance in these males is shorter, more like that of … girls.
Just in time for Mother's Day is the news that work-at-home Moms would earn $134,121 a year if they were paid for all their work.
Now you can track where your teenager is going. For $9.99 a month, Sprint offers you the Family Locator that lets parents track their kids' whereabouts using the GPS capabilities in each child's cellphone.
The whole idea of tracking your family in this manner is weird and alarming on some levels. So is the notion that we're all so deathly afraid for our kids that there's even a market for this.
But now that the technology is out there, it's not going away anytime soon.
That's what Michael Wofford says about the suit his ex-girlfriend is bringing for child support and college tuition for the twins she gave birth to after Michael agreed to donate sperm so she could have children.
Sperm donor sued for child support
"She was a lady with a plan -- and that plan wasn't marriage," Mirabelli said. "He trusted her. Why? Because she said 'I don't want anything from you. I just want your semen.' "
Both are 45 and met online at Match.com.
In this brave new world, new mothers have things to do older mothers can't even imagine. No wonder they're so exhausted.
From Mother Pie, First Baby? Top 10 Must Do List.
Three guests arrested in what police call 'baby shower gone bad'
A baby shower erupted into a fight among guests in which one man was shot and several other people, including the seven-months-pregnant guest of honor, were beaten with a stick, police say.
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The argument, over whether the woman let their five-year-old daughter drink beer, escalated
If the state subsidizes your education, does it have a say in how you use that education?
If you are a woman and want to stay home to raise your children, should you be punished?
Sharon Dijksma, a leading figure in the Dutch Labour Party, thinks so.
"A highly-educated woman who chooses to stay at home and not to work – that is destruction of capital,” she said in an interview last week. “If you receive the benefit of an expensive education at society’s expense, you should not be allowed to throw away that knowledge unpunished"
Talk about draining the life from a society.
There seems to be a blinder on the eyes of some feminists that they can not see the tremendous value and benefit to all society in mothers who devote their time to raising loving, secure and educated children.
Did we really need a new study to tell us that most new mothers are exhausted?
Well, maybe we did to learn that those who had C-sections or are breast-feeding are experiencing the most symptoms.
Or to learn that
76 percent of working mothers return to work within a year after the birth of their child. Forty-one percent of working mothers are back within three months, and nearly one in six is back within the first month after delivery.
Or to realize that in most other countries, mothers receive a great deal more support than they do here. Whether it's medical leave for post-partum recovery or support by existing groups of family, friends and neighbors.
New mothers need all the support and help they can get. Surely, if you know of a new mom, you can figure out a way to lend a hand, even for a couple of hours.
I'm a nut on natural sounds.
Years ago, I started collecting sounds of nature on cassette tapes, later on CDs. I've found them wonderful accompaniments to focused work, meditation, even sleep. I find actual recordings are far superior to white noise or sound machines though the latter works too.
I have them on my computer, my iPod, on CDs, even on my Audubon clock. I thought with a different bird call for each hour, I would learn to identify them by their song alone. No such luck. Seems as though I can only tell the nine o'clock bird from the noon bird.
I believe that without sounds of nature around, at least part of the day, we lose contact with the natural world. Too much sound from radio, TV, computers and iPods, disconnects us from the living, breathing world outside of our own bodies.
Natural sounds emerge from the silence that descends when we turn machines off. In a sheltered space, be it house or office or apartment, with windows closed, silence still brings the hum of the refrigerator or computer. That's why I use recordings.
True well-being brings an expanded sense of being alive. You can't be expanded without a greater sense of self that includes connectedness with nature, her ocean waves, morning song birds, waterfalls, and crickets.
Nature deficit sends kids down a desolate path
Author Richard Louv says kids don't get outside enough and so their bond with nature is not developed and they are suffering as a result. Kids need nature to develop their senses of learning and creativity and wonder.
"Nature is directly connected to our health. It helps us feel better physically and psychologically. It helps us pay attention."
He wonders whether the increase in ADD is attributable in part to children's isolation and alienation from the natural world. His campaign, "No Child Left Inside," calls for less time wired up, more time outside. Any patch of grass, vacant lot, woods or fields will work for kids.
His book
"Last Child in the Woods : Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder" (Richard Louv)
A fascinating thread on Metafilter. "Can you point to a single experience in your life, as a child" which you can define as having contributed to the person you are today?"
The contributions are moving and heartfelt. What struck me the most is how often a single action by a parent or a stranger can affect a whole life. Almost as striking is the number of people who found a home in books when their own was abusive or belittling.
Here are some selected responses:
1. Wayne Arnold let me hold the trumpet he just got from school (I was in kindergarten) and at that moment, I knew that I would have to play. 32 years later, I still play.ntinual process of lifelong learning.
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I was taken on a visit to a newspaper office when I was seven. Stood on the floor of the press hall and just knew.
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Parents' divorce and alcoholism. I learned these lessons early: I trust few people, never think about the future (in a fatalistic sense, not a live-for-today sense), and err on the side of caution every time. Life is a long series of hazards to be avoided and inescapable heartbreak.
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I won't talk about specific instances, but the abuse and neglect I experienced as a child has shaped the adult I am. I'm shy, withdrawn and have an extremely low sense of self-esteem. It has been, and will continue to be, a lifelong struggle to overcome my childhood.
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12 years old, just beginning to take those "career aptitude inventory" tests they give you, I share with my father my interest in one day becoming a computer engineer. His response, "How the hell are you ever gonna help anybody doing that!?" leads me to completely devalue my own interests and goals for the next four years or so in favor of what I think other people think I should be doing. Later I get my head on straight and realize he was being a complete jerk, but the damage is still done.
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My father had a serious heart attack the day before my twelfth birthday, and was not expected to survive. A very good cardiac surgeon completed the bypass operation on my birthday, and he survived for the next 18 years.
It was definitely an eye-opener about doctors, how important they were and how they sometimes did world-shaking things. I don't know if it's fair to say it's why I became a doctor, but it definitely got me thinking.
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When I was 16, our house burned down while our family was away. We had spent the last 6 years building it. We lost essentially all of our possessions. I lost a stamp collection and an Atari 400 that I'd worked an entire summer to earn. My father lost negatives and equipment from a 20-year photography career.
Building the house taught me and my siblings what hard work was, how to face it and thrive in it. Losing it, and all our possessions, taught me that things are just objects, not the center or my life or cause for deep, abiding emotional attachments.
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My father's childhood was one of those horrorshow ones about which others have written.
My deepest respect for him is that as a young man, he swore that he would never be like his father. And to his credit, he broke the cycle of violence. That took a lot, I'm sure.
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The short and easy answer would be the death of my father when I was five.
The better answer would be the time when I was probably 12, at a church father/son event of some sort, with a neighbor. I won the door prize -- for the third year in a row. It struck me that the contest was rigged, and I was being given some consideration for the fact that my father was dead. I decided to not let on that I had figured this out.
There were many adults I knew as a child who, in a quiet way, tried to help me out in whatever ways they could. I doubt I was ever grateful enough at the time, but as an adult and a father, their efforts, even the feeble and transparent ones, are always on my mind, and I do believe that I have a responsibility to do the same for the kids I know.
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We moved every year from the time I was born until I left home. I have no ties to anyone and no old friends. I joined the service, moved some more then went to college and moved twice more for a graduate then a doctorate program. I don't know anyone and have no idea how to maintain a friendship. But, I make a hell of a first impression.
What's with this?
Culture of contempt for parenthood
The painful paradox is that while women have liberated themselves from being defined by their biology - the fate of the girl in many African and Asian societies who is not truly a woman until she has given birth - mothers have ended up relegated to the status of constant abject failure in a culture driven by consumerism and workaholism. There is no kudos in being a mum, only in being other things - such as thin, or the boss - despite being a mum. Motherhood is a form of handicap.
Seems to me it's much of the reason behind the baby gap in Europe and elsewhere.
If our greatest biological imperative is the survival of the species, why are we so worried about becoming parents?
Mark Steyn as usual as the best word It's the Demography, Stupid.
There is growing evidence that female mammals with very high degrees of testosterone are more likely to give birth to males.
TOUGH, confident females may be more likely to give birth to sons than women with less pushy personalities, researchers have found.
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The discovery of the “queen bee” syndrome in mammals is the latest in a growing body of work that challenges the traditional view that a baby’s sex is determined by chance.
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Previous research by Grant has found that men with masculine jobs — police officers, soldiers and butchers — are more likely to produce girls.
Kian and Remee, one white, one black, both twin sisters born to mixed race parents. The odds, experts say, are about a million to one.
"It was a shock when I realized that my twins were two different colors," Kylie Hodgson, 19, told London's Daily Mail. "But it doesn't matter to us — they are just our two gorgeous little girls."
Snopes has the full story.
Im reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty and came across this passage
He was having an odd parental rush, a blood surge that was also above blood and was presently hunting through Howard's expansive intelligence to find words that would more effectively express something like
don't walk in front of cars take care and be good and don't hurt or be hurt and don't live in a way that make you feel dead and don't betray anybody or yourself and take care of what matters and please don't and please remember and make sure.
Is the promise of anonymity forever best for sperm donors? What about the children of sperm donors?
Most of the exotic reproductive technologies are unregulated and private fertility clinics like it that way. Anonymity allows them to escape accountability. After all, who wants to deal with health problems, like diabetes, that may not show up until decades later? Even more troubling is the possibility of inadvertent incest.
Like children anywhere, sperm donor children want to know where they come from. They want a more complete sense of their identity and not just on Father's Day. And there are 40,000 of them born each year
At least one child has tracked down his sperm donor father on the internet.
Britain now requires fertility clinics to register donors in a database the children can access later. But that has resulted in a steep decline in donors. I can understand why after the Swedish Supreme Court ruled that the biological sperm donor father of three children in a lesbian relationship was ordered to pay child support for all three.
The New York Times explores the issue in Are You My Sperm Donor? Few Clinics Say.
With ever more exotic reproductive technologies looming, like cloning and the engineering of traits like eye color and intelligence, some advocates for more regulation say there is a growing urgency to protect these children from what they call "genetic bewilderment." Guaranteeing children access to their genetic heritage, they say, could be the cornerstone of an industry ethics code.
"We need to get it right for donor conception," said Rebecca Hamilton, a law student at Harvard who created a documentary about searching for her donor father in New Zealand, "and use it as the basis for the million weird and wacky decisions coming our way."
Giving sperm donor children a right to access their genetic heritage is one cause I can fully support.
One of the more interesting phenomena of growing older is seeing men you knew as boys or as college lotharios become fathers of teenage girls.
Here's Jack Yoest's 10 Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter.
Rule Nine: Do not lie to me. I may appear to be a middle-aged, gray-headed, dimwitted has-been. But on issues relating to my daughter, I am the all-knowing, merciless god of your universe. If I ask you where you are going and with whom, you have one chance to tell me the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I have a shotgun, a shovel, and a half acre behind the house. Do not trifle with me.
Only 43% of college students are men. This is a very troubling trend for society. Why aren't more of us concerned about how poor our school system is for millions of boys. They are struggling and need help. They are our sons, our brothers and will be husbands and fathers. It's time for a Movement for Boys so they can be their very best.
Michael Gurian writes more in the Washington Post: Disappearing Act
Where Have the Men Gone? No Place Good
We all need to rethink things. We need to stop blaming, suspecting and overly medicating our boys, as if we can change this guy into the learner we want. When we decide -- as we did with our daughters -- that there isn't anything inherently wrong with our sons, when we look closely at the system that boys learn in, we will discover these boys again, for all that they are. And maybe we'll see more of them in college again.
Don't miss this tale of Love Gone Right over at Ambivablog who has the whole story and lots of photos. Where's there's life, there's love.
"It is incredible. A-less-than-a-year-old hippo has adopted a male tortoise, about a century old, and the tortoise seems to be very happy with being a 'mother'."
With 92% of heirs switching their advisors soon after getting their inheritance, private bankers are pulling out the stops in the battle for assets.
In the Brat Patrol, Barrons reports how private bankers are wooing the next generation.
banks, brokerage houses and boutiques catering to the wealthy appear to be brimming with ideas on how young people can handle money responsibly and gracefully. They're doling out parenting advice, running financial boot camps for clients' children and moderating family disputes. In part, the bankers are responding to clients' anxieties; many wealthy parents fear their kids will become idle layabouts or spoiled brats.
On the left is how a newborn perceives his mother's face says psychologist Frederck Maimstrom. On the right is the most familiar depiction of an alien.
In fact, it's how most self-described abductees describe their alien kidnappers. It may all be due to our primitive facial recognition template says Maimstrom. You can read more about Your Mama Looks Like E.T. in the Washington Post. Or read Maimstrom's article in Skeptic Magazine called Close Encounters of the Facial Kind.
HT Bookofjoe
Some of the disaffected, unemployed Muslim youths 6 who kept Paris burning for 16 days and entirely too gleeful after torching cars, churches day care centers and busses seem to be listening to their parents.
From the Washington Post, Parents Tears Calm Youth Rage
The parents have reclaimed the night in the suburban Paris town where France's unrest began two weeks ago. While arsons and clashes with police are continuing in dozens of
cities across France, fires have not burned in Clichy-sous-Bois since Monday night.
"The tears of our mothers stopped us," said Maldini, 26, a stout, French-born son of Algerian immigrants. He declined to provide his family name for fear of police harassment. "The parents, the mothers and fathers were all crying."
Other parents have no control. Some in France Ask: Where Are the Parents?
Many parents are struggling to make ends meet, leaving them little time for their children. They often can hardly communicate with their sons and daughters: Many parents are not French citizens and never learn to speak French, while their children don't learn the language of their ancestors.
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According to Sonia Imloul, who works with troubled teens in Seine-Saint-Denis, the Paris-area town hit hardest by the unrest, an estimated 40 percent of families in the suburbs are dysfunctional, causing a high rate of school dropouts, drug use, petty crime and aggressive behavior.
As David Brooks writes in Gangsta, in French, they are taking hip-hop as their model of how to be men.
After 9/11, everyone knew there was going to be a debate about the future of Islam. We just didn't know the debate would be between Osama bin Laden and Tupac Shakur.
Yet those seem to be the lifestyle alternatives that are really on offer for poor young Muslim men in places like France, Britain and maybe even the world beyond. A few highly alienated and fanatical young men commit themselves to the radical Islam of bin Laden. But most find their self-respect by embracing the poses and worldview of American hip-hop and gangsta rap.
One of the striking things about the scenes from France is how thoroughly the rioters have assimilated hip-hop and rap culture. It's not only that they use the same hand gestures as American rappers, wear the same clothes and necklaces, play the same video games, and sit with the same sorts of car stereos at full blast. It's that they seem to have adopted the same poses of exaggerated manhood, the same attitudes about women, money and the police. They seem to have replicated the same sort of gang culture, the same romantic visions of gunslinging drug dealers.
For the first time, an anonymous sperm donor was traced on the Internet
LATE last year, a 15-year-old boy rubbed a swab along the inside of his cheek, popped it into a vial and sent it off to an online genealogy DNA-testing service. But unlike most people who contact the service, he was not interested in sketching the far reaches of his family tree. His mother had conceived using donor sperm and he wanted to track down his genetic father.
That the boy succeeded using only the DNA test, genealogical records and some internet searches has huge implications for the hundreds of thousands of people who were conceived using donor sperm. With the explosion of information about genetic inheritance, any man who has donated sperm could potentially be found by his biological offspring. Absent and unknown fathers will also become easier to trace.
The teenager tracked down his father from his Y chromosome. The Y is passed from father to son virtually unchanged, like a surname. So the pattern of gene variants it carries can help identify which paternal line an individual has descended from and can also be linked to a man's surname.
The boy paid FamilyTreeDNA.com $289 for the service. His genetic father had never supplied his DNA to the site, but all that was needed was for someone in the same paternal line to be on file.
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Though his donor had been anonymous, his mother had been told the man's date and place of birth and his college degree. Using another online service, Omnitrace.com, he purchased the names of everyone that had been born in the same place on the same day. Only one man had the surname he was looking for, and within 10 days he had made contact.
"This is the first time that I know of it being done," says Bryan Sykes, a geneticist at the University of Oxford and chairman of OxfordAncestors.com, a genetic genealogy service. The case raises serious questions about whether past promises of anonymity can be honoured, he says.
He was only 14 when Blake Ross began working at Netscape. By 19 he had co-created Firefox, an open-source browser that has been downloaded 100 million times and garnered 10% of Internet Explorer's market share.
New York Times technology columnist David Pogue interviewed him in One Teen's Gigantic Contribution to the Internet.
My absolutely favorite part:
DP: And how were you, a bunch of volunteers, able to do this when the best and the brightest, highest paid programmers from Microsoft could not?
BR: First of all, they dropped the ball. Internet Explorer hasn't been updated since 2001. And so when Microsoft basically disbanded the Internet Explorer team, the Web started to outpace the Web browser.
We guide our development by what our users want, not by the dollar. You know, no other factors come into play except these features that people are asking for. So basically I go home and I say, "Hey, Mom, you know, what's still wrong with the internet? What's bothering you?" And she tells me.
DP: You ask your mom?
BR: Well, she'll yell at me. And I'll say, "Mom, calm down. What's wrong?" And then I'll fix that.
DP: I wonder why Bill Gates's mom couldn't do the same thing?
BR: Yeah (laughs).
Nearly 1.5 million babies were born to unmarried woman in the U.S. last year, almost 36% of all births, a new record.
There is a downward trend of teenagers who accounted for only 24% of the births. The increase was among women 25-29.
States Ranked: Smart to Dumb. Graded on 21 factors by the 2005-2006 Education State Rankings, New England states made the top three. The smartest state is Vermont. The dumbest is Arizona.
Thinking ahead, parents have to start early, like Dooce
This is what I like to call Vacation Parenting. Much like a Vacation Diet you get to break all the rules: you get to eat bacon and let the kid drink Diet Coke out of a sippy cup. OH DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT, my sister fed her babies Diet Coke in a bottle. THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. Jon asked me yesterday if I thought we were terrible parents, having let our daughter watch television in her lap and ingest orange Styrofoam. And I told him, “You forgot the part where she backed up into the wall and I laughed at her. If anything we’re preparing her for the first time she gets drunk in college.”
A Swedish man who donated sperm to a lesbian couple now must pay child support for their three children.
Nothing is more heart-breaking than the sudden death of an infant especially when the parents thought the infant was sleeping.
SIDS, the sudden infant death syndrome, is mysterious and remains unexplained even after an autopsy and examination of the death scene and it kills more than 2000 each year.
Monday, at the annual meeting of the american Academy of Pediatrics, new guidelines to prevent SIDS were released.
In a nutshell, they recommend giving infants over one month a pacifier at bedtime and letting infants sleep in their parents' room but not in their parents' bed.
Fascinating essay by Ann Althouse discussing whether the man should be present at childbirth if it could destroy the man's sexual attraction to the woman
Must - should - the man witness childbirth?
I'd say get the facts and make a sound decision for yourself. And don't focus on the childbirth experience so much. It's like focusing on the wedding and not the actual married life that will follow. The wedding is not the marriage, and the childbirth is not the family. The real happiness is to be found (or lost) in marriage and family, not in weddings and childbirth. Real life is lived in all those ordinary days, not on those big occasions that seem to matter so much when you're starting out.
In the secret world of surrogacy, where older women buy eggs from other women or arrange for other women to carry and bear their child,
Melanie McGuire was an "emotional midwife", available at any time to talk with her clients.
A client of Reproductive Medical Associates, Jennifer Calise, is quoted in the Style section of Sunday's New York Times
The entire process is a leap of faith. As a parent who is entrusting strangers with your DNA - your eggs, your sperm, your future children - it's really a scary prospect.
The emotional midwife has been arrested for murder. Prosecutors charge her with shooting her husband, dismembering him, putting the cut-up pieces into black garbage bags, then into suitcases, throwing them off a bridge, before carrying on her life and career for over a year before her arrest.
Murder Stirs Surrogacy Network
A recent study in the UK reveals that many dads are unknowingly raising children that are not theirs.
Calling it a Pandora's Box with broad health implications, British researchers say genetic testing is informing about 4 percent of fathers that a child they are raising is not their own.
It all began with Demi Moore. Remember how shocking it was to see her naked and very pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair way back in 1991?
Now, pregnant women are clamoring for similar shots of their pregnant selves. This new type of family portrait is taking off with even J.C. Penny offering a maternity package at its 400 photography studios.
From Letting It All Hang Out in the Wall St. Journal
Jennifer Loomis, a photographer who focuses almost exclusively on maternity clients, brings in revenues of about $300,000 annually.
"The message I'm trying to communicate is one of strength, transformation and beauty," says Ms. Loomis. "I'm helping them capture one of the most interesting times of their lives."
There was a time not so long ago when fathers weren't allowed in delivery rooms to see their children being born. Today, that's completely changed and fathers are expected to support their wives and share in the miracle of childbirth.
Neither an ocean nor a war could keep Sgt William Hammock from seeing his wife Angela give birth through streaming audio and video.
Was there ever such a story that combined tragedy with hope, sadness with love?
Is there any doubt that this is what Susan Torres would have wanted? Her dying body, riddled with cancer, was yet suffused with love sufficient to bring a healthy baby to life - Susan Anne Catherine Torres.
Brain dead mother taken off life support from the Washington Post .
After her husband and parents said their last goodbyes and after a priest offered a prayer -- words about weeping in a valley of tears -- Susan Torres, her improbable mission accomplished, was unhooked yesterday morning from the machines that sustained not only her body but that of her baby for the past three months.
The 26-year-old Arlington woman, who was felled by cancer and declared brain-dead in May, but who gave birth by Caesarean section Tuesday to the girl she had hoped for, died shortly thereafter. It was the end her family knew was inevitable, but it was no less difficult to fathom.
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Jason Torres, who slept by his wife's side for three months, whose cell phone still carries her voice and who made the final decision to unhook the machines, stayed away from the cameras and crowds of reporters who had come to the hospital to find out, among other things, how his new daughter, Susan Anne Catherine Torres, was doing.
Strange happening on the night of Susan Torres' tragic collapse.
On the night of Susan’s collapse, May 7, said Sonny, he returned home with his wife Karen at about 3:00am, and went to bed, exhausted. At about 4:15am, without any warning, he awoke and sat bolt upright. Karen also awoke and asked him what the matter was.
“What it was,” he said, “it wasn’t a dream…This was so different from a dream…so…so powerful. It was words that came to me. It was a woman’s voice; my wife made me write it down. It wasn’t a request, it was a command.”......
“.......Sonny said that although it struck him at the time as a singular and unusual experience, he put it down to overwrought nerves, still barely coming to terms with the tragedy of his daughter-in-law’s sudden collapse only a few hours before. It wasn’t until the following day when he began to tell his son what happened that he was given a palpable reason to think of it as something more than imagination.
“I went to my son later that day,” continued Sonny, “and I began to tell him about it and he said ‘Stop! Let me tell you what I had.’ We compared notes, and it happened about the same time—4:15 in the morning. And his is almost word for word of mine.”
The words that both Sonny and Jason believe they heard, before the life-affirming story of Susan ever reached the ears of a journalist or a newsman, are the following:
“You and others will tell the world of a fight to save a precious life, not to change hardened hearts, but to give hope to those who believe, so that they know that there is more than what they see and hear. Let them come and see for themselves.”
Congratulations and condolences to the Torres family.
Ripped from today's headlines Pop Shock.
A Brooklyn man who claims his estranged wife forged his name to get hold of his frozen sperm and used it to conceive a daughter has been ordered to pay child support — and has filed a multimillion-dollar suit for reimbursement.
The lawyer for the unwitting dad, LIRR engineer Deon Francois, says New York University's famed fertility clinic should be responsible for the little girl's expenses through college.
It may seem like good news that divorce rates have declined until you learn that marriage rates have declined even more dramatically.
Couples who once might have wed and then divorced now are not marrying at all, according to The State of our Unions 2005. The annual report, which analyzes Census and other data, is issued by the National Marriage Project at New Jersey's Rutgers University.
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Cohabitation is here to stay," says David Popenoe, a Rutgers sociology professor and report co-author. "I don't think it's good news, especially for children," he says. "As society shifts from marriage to cohabitation — which is what's happening — you have an increase in family instability.
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The USA has the lowest percentage among Western nations of children who grow up with both biological parents, 63%, the report says.
I'm with Brooke Shields and not Tom Cruise when it comes to post-partum depression or baby blues.
Better yet, I'm all for midwives, visiting nurses and temporary nannies to help a new mother out. It only makes sense when a mother is going through one of the biggest transitions of her life. She needs the experience of people who understand what's going on and what she needs, especially sleep.
Turns out, now a study shows that personalized care by health professionals may very well prevent post-partum depression.
Just catching up on some Father's Day posts when I come across th
What do donor-sperm babies do on Father's Day?
Many are adults now and they want to know more about their genetic dads. Sperm donors' offspring.
As the first large generation of sperm donor babies comes of age, some are beginning to look for their biological dads, much as adopted children have sought out their birth parents. The searches pit young people's desire to discover their roots against donors' expectations that their identities never will be disclosed.
Like so many new developments, this one is unfolding in large part on the Internet, where many sperm donor offspring are posting queries about their origins and claiming a right to know their parentage.
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In a survey of adolescents published in November in the journal Human Reproduction, researchers at the University of California-Davis found that the thing the children wanted most, other than the donor's name, was a picture.
"They are not looking to establish a father-son/daughter relationship and [they] are not looking for financial or other support," said Eric Blyth, a professor of social work at the University of Huddersfield in England, who has written extensively about the topic.
What they want, he says, is "a more complete sense of their identity."
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"I feel my right to know who I am and where I come from has been taken away," she says.
Via Daddytalks who says
well, it seems no one was really thinking of the children when the whole spermbank thing started. Gee, you mean an industry that's almost entirely dependent on college students masturbating for beer money doesn't think much about the future consequences? There's a surprise.
It seems as every day, I learn that there are more ways to be cruel than I ever imagined. Life is tough for boys these days all around and everywhere.
Julian Borger in The Guardian
The lost boys, thrown out of US sect so that older men can marry more wives
Up to 1,000 teenage boys have been separated from their parents and thrown out of their communities by a polygamous sect to make more young women available for older men, Utah officials claim.
Many of these "Lost Boys", some as young as 13, have simply been dumped on the side of the road in Arizona and Utah, by the leaders of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS), and told they will never see their families again or go to heaven.
via Best of the Web, James Taranto
It is fitting with father's Day close upon us that I remember again the most important lesson my beloved father, dead now 14 years taught me.
He treated everyone the same, everyone with respect. A tall, good-looking Irishman, he was greatly respected in his profession - he was an arbitrator and loved by many.
I was reminded when I read Janice Turner's piece in the London Times.
The real test of character: how big people treat little people
OVER THE YEARS I have improvised my own psychometric tests for evaluating a person’s character. I determine someone’s profligacy with money by how deeply they are prepared to fish around in a full kitchen bin to retrieve a lost knife. I rate their joie de vivre by whether, if a child’s football crosses their path in the park, they step over it glumly or boot it back with a grin.
But my definitive test is how someone treats the people who serve them, those over whom, if so inclined, they can exercise cruel and arbitrary power. I once listened to a teenager boast, while her mother giggled indulgently, that she had tormented their Austrian au pair until she’d left. That one remark told me all I needed to know about that family. Men who are churlish to waiters, women who berate their cleaners, mothers who brag that they’ve run through 14 nannies in seven years: can’t middle-class professionals learn how to behave with all these newly acquired staff?
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A colleague who had lunch with the Prime Minister told me that even deep in conversation about the euro he always made eye contact with the waiter each time he was served. Of course, it would be crass to judge someone entirely on their private good grace, to rate US presidents not by, say, their foreign policy but the fact that the Clintons were cold and haughty with their security detail while the Bushes are affectionate, informal and kind.
"I get babies to sleep through the night" could be the elevator pitch for Suzy Giordano. But she doesn't need it. She's already a legend in the Washington DC area for her ability to teach newborn babies how to sleep through the night.
"Sleep," says Tia Cudahy, a Giordano client who has a toddler and infant twins, "is the difference between misery and joy when you have a newborn."
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According to Giordano, there are two basic tasks to accomplish before the big sleep can be achieved. The first is to shift babies to a schedule where they consume enough breast milk or formula during the day to sustain a night without feedings. The second is to teach the baby to self-soothe, so that he or she can get back to sleep without assistance, and even stay happily in the crib in the morning until mom or dad arrives for breakfast.
"The key is to just slow down the parents so they can have a better vision of the responsibility," Giordano says.
So there are feeding logs and plans based on a baby's weight and age. By about eight weeks, as long as a baby has passed the nine-pound milestone, Giardano shifts into what she calls "baby boot camp," when nighttime feedings are gradually spaced apart and phased out, and late-night and early-morning wakings are handled without the baby getting picked up and held. Instead she rubs the babies, pats their bellies, helps gently move them into more comfortable positions.
"Children are always a good thing, devoutly to be wished for and fiercely to be fought for."
Justin Torres writes about the "hesitation" many of the attending doctors, even his own family feel about what they are doing.
Last month his sister in law Susan Torres, 26 years old, the mother of a two year old and 17 weeks pregnant, suffered a stroke brought on by undiagnosed melanoma. She now lies brain dead in a Virginia hospital, on life support, with no hope of ever recovering. Her family is keeping her alive in the hope that by so doing they will save the life of the unborn child.
Keeping this baby alive is Susan's last act of love, one that has been tremendously moving to watch even as it makes you question everything you thought you knew about the fundamental justice of the world.
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Fifty years ago, medicine could not have done what we are trying to do. But I suspect that if it could have been done, no one then would have hesitated. The answer would have been, Of course, we must try to save the child, because saving children is what medicine is meant to do.
You know those little cans of compressed air that you use to clean off your computer? Dust-off.
Turns out that teen-agers, especially those 14-16, have died after 'huffing" from cans of Dust-off. The propellant R2 is to blame as a father writes about the tragic death of his son Kyle, confirmed by Snopes.
But it could. Time to tell your kids some scary stories.
a great number of teens and pre-teens routinely attempt to get high by abusing inhalants and solvents found in common household products. Dust-Off is just one of a thousand or more products that can abruptly end the life of someone foolishly looking for an inhalant high. The list of items that can be turned to this purpose is almost endless and includes such innocuous-looking goods as hair spray and aerosol whipped cream. Depending on how the intoxicant is taken in, the process is referred to as 'bagging' or 'huffing' — bagging requires the substance be contained in a plastic or paper bag which the thrill-seeker then breathes from, while huffing involves either breathing directly from an aerosol or through a cloth soaked in solvent.
Both bagging and huffing can, and have, proved fatal. Sudden death can result on the first try, making one's first time seeking this particular kick also one's last. That first time's being a killer isn't an exaggeration, either: 22% of all inhalant-abuse deaths occur among users who had not previously bagged or huffed. Suffocation, dangerous behavior, and aspiration account for 45% of inhalant abuse fatalities, with "sudden sniffing death" (fatal cardiac arrhythmia) causing the remaining 55%.
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Inhalant abuse is rife among children and teens for a number of reasons beyond the usual factors that inspire young people to experiment with drugs, such as curiousity, thrill seeking, escapism, defiance, and peer pressure. First, the products required to produce inhalant highs are readily available in every home. Even when users have to resort to buying their own, the goods cost little and are easy to purchase, both in terms of availability (almost every store sells at least a few items that can be huffed) and lack of challenge by sales clerks (kids generally need not fear provoking adult disapproval or undue questioning through the act of buying cans of whipped cream). No drug dealers need be sought out, no furtive connections with the underworld made; purchases are easily effected at the corner store, even by the most unsavvy and knock-kneed with terror at the thought of being caught.
Second, because these products are an ordinary part of the household landscape, they take on for many a presumption of safety. Few adults are accustomed to thinking of air freshener as something that can kill, or of Magic Markers as items that can end lives; these are instead viewed as non-dangerous goods, the sort of ordinary household necessities one doesn't so much as look at twice let alone regard with mistrust. Kids can easily take that bland acceptance a step further, adding a presumption of harmlessness to that which is routinely left about for anyone to use.
Mothers of all types from all backgrounds are increasingly upset at the popular culture which threatens their ability to impart positive values to their children according to a recent survey.
"We heard mothers talking about the kind of hypersexuality that's out there, about violence and disrespect, about body image, all the things that are not exactly news, but cutting across a huge and diverse sample of mothers," says Martha Farrell Erickson of the University of Minnesota, lead researcher on the study, released by the Institute for American Values in New York. "What they would really like to see is mothers and fathers joining forces more effectively to take on some of these issues."
Politics did not come up naturally in these mothers' group conversations; they see the solutions more through the avenue of personal and community action, rather than dumping these problems on the doorstep of government
I have never read a more moving, intelligent discussion about abortion than by Amba, an accomplished writer, whose AmbivaBlog is describes as "the swing state of the religious and political blogosphere."
Here are the first two of a three-part series.
The simplest central tenet of feminism – that being female is a full human plenitude, not a shameful lack – had saved my soul. Abortion, I believed, was a woman’s business. My body, my choice. Case closed.
Then I had one.
But once it has successfully taken root, there’s something else we know about a human embryo:
-- That it has a drive to live and to become. How sensate or aware it may be at this stage is a mystery. That it intends with every molecule of its being to survive and fulfill its design is not. In fact – and it is a fact -- that drive is powerful enough to propel it eighty years into the future.
I should probably amend my statement that “we know this.” When we’re young, we don’t. We just think about “having a baby,” and maybe raising a child, from the foreshortened perspective of our own desires and life plans. This is one of the drawbacks of living in a culture that does its damndest to stay “forever young.” Only someone older, who’s taken a step back from the life cycle, can point out to you the reality that “a baby” will, barring misfortune, become a young adult, a middle-aged person, an old woman or man. I now look at the young and see how time will change their faces; I look at the old and imagine how they looked as a child. And when I think about a new embryo, and our “choice” to uproot it or harbor it, I don’t only, or even mainly, see an “innocent child.” I see that what we hold in our hands is the power to greenlight or to cancel – to make nothing -- a potentially eighty-year human life.
That’s pretty terrifying, when you think about it. And I’m suggesting that we should think about it. I know I don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of convincing the “pro-life” that early abortion should stay legal, as I still sadly believe it must. But I do think I have a chance of convincing at least some of the “pro-choice” that women should be as terrified of risking accidental pregnancy now as we were back when abortion was illegal – not out of fear of the law or the dirty scalpel, but out of understanding of what’s at stake.
What does it feel like to know that you were created with donated sperm or a rented womb?
The Chicago Tribune today has a story about such donor-conceived children who suffer not knowing anything about their real fathers or mothers even as they are protective of their nurturing , generally same-sex couples. Their search to make sense of themselves and their origins is painful when people tell them "it shouldn't matter."
...[D]onor-conceived children know that the parents raising them are also the ones who intentionally created them with a severed relationship to at least one of their biological parents. The pain they feel was caused not by some distant, shadowy person who gave them up, but by the parent who cares for them.
This knowledge brings the loyalty and love they naturally feel for the parents raising them in direct conflict with the identity quest we all must go through. When they ask, "Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here?" they confront a welter of painful uncertainties our culture hasn't begun to understand.
From Kids need a real past by Elizabeth Marquardt.
At the UCLS Center on Everyday Lives of Families, a recent study concludes that family dynamics are changing dramatically with both parents working outside the home -they are barely coping.
From Compassion at stake for families in motion by Joseph Verrengia
That change means parents and children live virtually apart at least five days a week. When they are together, today’s families tend to stay in motion with lessons, classes and games.
Mothers in the UCLA study still bear the key household and child-rearing responsibilities, even while working full time.
Researchers contend that this appears to erode families from within, like a rusting minivan dropping parts as it clatters down the highway. What’s falling by the wayside? Playtime. Conversation. Courtesy. Intimacy.
“We’ve scheduled and outsourced a lot of our relationships,” said the study’s director, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist. “There isn’t much room for the flow of life, those little moments when things happen spontaneously, and we’re moving from a child-centered society to a child-dominated society. Parents don’t have a life after the children go to bed.”
For Ochs, the most worrisome trend is how indifferently people treat each other, especially when they reunite at the day’s end. Other human cultures — even other species like wolves — greet each other in elaborate ways that reinforce social bonds. In her view, the chilly exchanges repeated in so many of the study’s households suggest something has gone awry.
“Returning home at the end of the day is one of the most delicate and vulnerable moments in life,” Ochs said. “Everywhere in the world, in all societies, there is some kind of greeting.
“But here, the kids aren’t greeting the parents and the parents are allowing it to go on,” Ochs said. “They are tiptoeing around their children.”
From the Annals of Improbable Research, the Dead Grandmother / Exam Syndrome
The basic problem can be stated very simply: A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.
And in Britain, extra credit given if a pet dies on day of exam, more if parent or grandparent, as reported by the BBC.
A German mother of three is happy to go to jail instead of paying a parking fine so she can get a rest from her "demanding" children and "lazy" husband.
I don't doubt it for a moment. I am the oldest of seven children and my mother loved working part time in a hospital emergency room when we were all young. I heard from people she worked with that when she got to work, she'd say, "Thank God, I can relax." In an emergency room!
Here's a wonderful passalong for Mother's Day. I'd love to credit the original author of these "Momisms" but I don't know who it is. If you do, let me know.
WHAT I OWE MY MOTHER
My mother taught me TO APPRECIATE A JOB WELL DONE. If you're going to kill each other, do it outside. I just finished cleaning.
My mother taught me RELIGION. You better pray that will come out of the carpet.
My mother taught me about TIME TRAVEL. If you don't straighten up, I'm going to knock you into the middle of next week!
My mother taught me LOGIC. Because I said so, that's why.
My mother taught me MORE LOGIC. If you fall out of that swing and break your neck, you're not going to the store with me.
My mother taught me FORESIGHT. Make sure you wear clean underwear in case you're in an accident.
My mother taught me IRONY. Keep crying, and I'll give you something to cry about.
My mother taught me about the science of OSMOSIS. Shut your mouth and eat your supper.
My mother taught me about CONTORTIONISM. Will you look at that dirt on the back of your neck!
My mother taught me about STAMINA. You'll sit there until all that spinach is gone.
My mother taught me about WEATHER. This room of yours looks as if a tornado went through it.
My mother taught me about HYPOCRISY. If I told you once, I've told you a million times. Don't exaggerate!
My mother taught me the CIRCLE OF LIFE. I brought you into this world, and I can take you out.
My mother taught me about ANTICIPATION. Just wait until we get home
My mother taught me MEDICAL SCIENCE. If you don't stop crossing your eyes, they are going to freeze that way.
My mother taught me ESP. Put your sweater on; don't you think I know when you are cold?
My mother taught me HUMOR. When that lawn mower cuts off your toes, don't come running to me.
My mother taught me GENETICS. You're just like your father.
My mother taught me about my ROOTS. Shut that door behind you. Do you think you were born in a barn?
My mother taught me WISDOM. When you get to be my age, you'll understand.
My mother taught me about JUSTICE. One day you'll have kids and I hope they turn out just like you!
With 11 million stay-at-home Moms caring for 41 million children under 15, Salary.com has estimated that each, if paid at prevailing rates for the jobs they do, would earn about $131,471//year. And that's without a 401(k)
They estimated the salaries of a day care worker, van driver, housekeeper, cook, CEO, nurse and general maintenance worker to come up with a base pay of $43, 461 and overtime of $88,009.
Makes the gift you've chosen for Mother's Day seem sort of puny, doesn't it.
I don't think you have to go this far.
Arnold Schwarzenegger burns his children's dirty clothes if they leave them lying about.
From the Boston Globe, by Megan Trench
The tragic journey of Patrick Holland, the first child in state history to divorce a parent, passed a hopeful milestone yesterday when the 15-year-old emerged from a courthouse grinning alongside his new adoptive parents.
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In a brief but emotional ceremony at Norfolk Probate Court, Patrick was adopted by Ron and Rita Lazisky, his mother's best friends. The couple cared for him after his father shot and bludgeoned his mother to death in Quincy in 1998
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Patrick didn't set out to make national news by winning a groundbreaking legal battle last year to divorce his father. He also didn't aim to be a trailblazer by pushing a bill now before the Legislature.
Called Patrick's Law, the bill would automatically terminate the parental rights of a parent convicted of murdering the other. There are similar laws in Florida, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Virginia. The bill would also give children a say in whether to terminate the parent's rights permanently.
If you're a parent with young kids, here's a why to keep up with Kid-Tech News
With a HT to Ken LeeBow at Blogging about Incredible Blogs who says in Got Kids? "Believe me, there are a lot of issues. For example, here's an article about cyberbullying. It's moved to the blogosphere. If you're a parent or you work with kids, be sure to put this one in your RSS reader.
Via the Anchoress, this from Tim Russert
Russert said. "Who are our children? How do we get into their hearts and minds," Russert asked, "to get them to see the value of our values?" In dealing with his own son, Luke, Russert added that he tells him, "You are always, always loved, but you are never entitled."
You are always loved, but you are never entitled.
Passalong lessons learned from a Mom in Texas.
Things I have learned from my boys (honest and not kidding):
1.) A king size waterbed holds enough water to fill a 2,000 sq. ft. house 4 inches deep.
2.) If you spray hair spray on dust bunnies and run over them with roller blades, they can ignite.
3.) A 3-year old boy's voice is louder than 200 adults in a crowded restaurant.
4.) If you hook a dog leash over a ceiling fan, the motor is not strong enough to rotate a 42-pound boy wearing Batman underwear and a Superman cape. It is strong enough, however, if tied to a paint can, to spread paint on all four walls of a 20x20 ft. room.
5.) You should not throw baseballs up when the ceiling fan is on. When using a ceiling fan as a bat, you have to throw the ball up a few times before you get a hit. A ceiling fan can hit a baseball a long way.
6.) The window panes (even double-panes) do not stop a baseball hit by a ceiling fan.
7.) When you hear the toilet flush and the words "uh oh", it is already too late.
8.) Brake fluid mixed with Clorox makes smoke, and lots of it.
9.) A six-year old boy can start a fire with a flint rock even though a 36-year old man says they can only do it in the movies.
10.) Certain Lego's will pass through the digestive tract of a 4-year old Boy.
12.) No matter how much Jell-O you put in a swimming pool you still can't walk on water.
14.) Pool filters do not like Jell-O.
15). VCR's do not eject "PB & J" sandwiches even though TV commercials show they do.
16.) Garbage bags do not make good parachutes.
17.) Marbles in gas tanks make lots of noise when driving.
18.) You probably do NOT want to know what that odor is.
19.) Always look in the oven before you turn it on. Plastic toys do not like ovens (and vice versa).
21.) The spin cycle on the washing machine does not make earthworms dizzy.
22.) It will, however, make cats dizzy.
23.) Cats throw up twice their body weight when dizzy.
24.) Most of the men who read this will try mixing the Clorox and brake fluid.
25.) Almost all of the women will pass this on to almost all of their friends, with or without kids.
Paul Raeburn, was once a senior writer and editor at BusinessWeek where he covered science and medicine for seven years and has written a harrowing book Acquainted with The Night about the mental illness of two of his children. One suffered from bipolar disorder and the other from depression and the quest to find them proper treatment laid waste his marriage and his sense of himself. One Amazon reader called it "the best book I've ever read about mental illness."
You don't get through life without suffering and often, it's the only way you grow up, but the suffering of one's children seems particularly hard. Children with mental illness seem to suffer especially from our health system and very few get good counseling or therapy. That is not how we should be treating our future which children are.
This book was non-put-downable because Raeburn is such a marvelous and honest writer, even when it comes to his own many faults. Still, because of his relentless love and advocacy, I'm happy to say both children survived, got through some very bad patches and seem to be living decent lives. The unsettling message: If you have a child with a mental illness, no one will really know what's wrong or how to treat it. You do the best you can and hope they outgrow it like Raeburn's children.
With all the moaning and groaning by the women in the Newsweek cover story on Mommy Madness, all trying to be perfect Moms, it's a cold, clear drink of refreshing thought to read Rachel Balducci at Testosterhome, mother of four young boys
It is absolutely painful for me to watch when parents let their children run the show. One saving grace for Paul and I is that, when Ethan was very little, my sister-in-law told us about putting the baby down when he was still awake so he could learn to fall asleep on his own. She was the Queen of the 7 p.m. bedtime (and didn't get a lot of support from her friends, some of whom thought it cruel). I have seen families whose entire lives are up-ended for years because a child cannot fall asleep on his own. By taking that first step of control (Bedtime!), so many other things fell into place ("Because I said so, that's why!").
Here's a great story via Jeff Brokaw's Notes & Musings about a brave young boy who named his tumor "Frank", short for Frankenstein.
His mother employed the power of the Internet to save her son's life.
She found a surgeon who used an alternative procedure to the traditional craniotomy, the cutting through her son's face and skull that in any event would be too risky given the location of 'Frank'
She printed up "Frank Must Die" on bumper stickers and sold them on ebay to cover the costs of the surgery.
The tumor was shrunk, then removed through the boy's nose without cutting his face.
The surgeon did not charge for the procedure.
The mother donated the money raised to a charity to help other children with cancer.
The tumor was no longer cancerous according to the biopsy.
The boy is alive, happy and celebrated his 10th birthday.
According to the website, raisingyourgrandchildren.com, more than six million children, approximately 1 in 12, are living in households headed by grandchildren (4.5 million children) or other relatives (1.5 million children). That's a lot of grandparents suddenly facing new challenges -financial, legal and emotional, the business of life.
When grandparents or kinship caregivers raise children, it is for various reasons. It may be because there was the death of a parent or a parent is away in the military, but more often than not, there is a correlation between alcohol and drug abuse and neglect. The parent/s may be mentally ill, incarcerated, or simply and unfortunately incapable of caring for their children.
According to the U.S. 2000 Census, there were close to 2 1/2 million households with grandparents raising their grandchildren. This figure does not even count kinship caregivers such as people raising their brother or sister's children or, even yet, raising their niece or nephew's children. Fifty-seven percent of grandparents raising their grandchildren are still in the work force and 17% are living in poverty.
As grandparents we may have had no mental, emotional, or financial preparation when we began raising our grandchildren. It can be more than overwhelming. Everything, from needing diapers and formula, an appropriate car seat for the toddler, to dealing with a drug-addicted teenager, may need to be immediately addressed..
Karen Anderson, who began the website, is also writing a blog. My hat off to her and her husband and all the other grandparents who are doing such important work saving children from shattered families.
Thanks too to David St. Lawrence at Ripples for letting me know.
