Archive for the 'Children' Category

And now, a word from my children

I don’t remember how the conversation started, but a few days ago I found myself explaining to my children that, amongst all human beings, regardless of their race or culture, there is one common denominator for beauty: symmetry. This means that whether a culture measures beauty by fair or dark skin, light or [...]

Regrouping as a prelude to political blogging

I had my day all planned.  I was going to head out early for a one hour talk at the local school regarding cyber bullying, and then I was going to come home and blog a while about Obama’s speech, since I’ve had more time to think about it.  But the best laid plans and [...]

Out of the mouths of babes

Last night, my husband had the kids join him while he watched the last 45 minutes of Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe. I blogged about it here.  If you haven’t watched it — and I don’t recommend it — I would summarize it briefly as an incredibly stupid anti-War, anti-American movie that cannot be salvaged [...]

Parenting puzzle

A few months ago, I did a post about out-of-control children who seemed to be the product, not of biological pathology, but of boundary-free parenting.  A couple of weeks ago, I did a post about parents who were afraid to exert control over their children because of their fear of Child Protective Services.  And last [...]

It’s not just in America that schools fear letting children play

I posted earlier today about a friend’s elementary school, which has banned recess-time soccer and football in the wake of a child’s injury while playing football.  America isn’t the only place having a problem with the fact that kids take their knocks when they play.  England, guided by the EU, is being encouraged to make [...]

Let kids be kids — not!

I received this email from a friend, who thought that you all might have some useful input about a recent policy change at her daughter’s elementary school:
Apparently a boy got hit in the head playing football at recess and hurt himself, though I don’t know in what way or how badly.
The school’s response has been [...]

Must boast

We left early this morning to attend a 5K race that my 5th grader has been training for over the past three months.  I signed all of us up, though, assuming that, while she ran, the rest of us would walk the race.  My 3rd grader, however, announced his intention to run too, despite never [...]

Non-traditional families are not good for children

One of the constant themes from the Left is that a traditional home, with a biological mother and father (or a home with a married mother and father who have committed to adopting children) is no better than a single mother home, or a two father home, or a two mother home. With respect [...]

Children at risk

I have one more school children post I want to do today, and this one is scary and depressing. It’s also not new, because it’s an issue that’s been around and about which I’ve blogged before: the possible terrorist threat to our children. Danny Lemieux gave me the heads up about the [...]

Here’s how the story could have been reported, Part II

A few months ago, I took umbrage at a BBC news story that reported that Israel killed Palestinian children and only saw fit to mention, in the 5th and 6th paragraphs, that the children were fiddling around rocket launchers when Israel fired its missiles. I felt that the news was being reported to demonize [...]

Another paradigm blown to bits

“I’m not a child development expert, but I play one on TV.”
Wait. That’s not what I meant to say, but it just sounded so silly, I had to. What I really meant to say is that I’m not a child development expert, but I hang around with a whole bunch of kids. [...]

The days of good sportsmanship are over

I was perusing the “site plan” for my kids’ school, a document that spells out what the school’s goals are regarding education and the means by which they put those goals into effect. After deciphering the usual cant and education babble, I learned that our school wants to teach our kids to read, write, [...]

They can’t read very well, but they hate carbon emissions

Schools constantly complain about the pressure to meet actual academic standards, but they somehow always find time to beat the children over the heads with social or political issues — and always from the point of view of the Lefter side of the political spectrum:
Third-grade teacher Debbie Robles made her acting debut before a packed [...]

Unwitting little brownshirts

One of Hitler’s most evilly inspired ideas was to go after the young people, and turn them into spies in their own parents’ homes.  It’s so much easier to grab children’s minds, and parents never assume that, not only are their children watching them, they can be co-opted, innocently, into ratting them out to people [...]

Birth control pills for little girls

I’m still irked about the middle school in Portland, Maine that had the bright idea to bypass parents and give birth control pills to little girls. My irritation goes beyond the fact that the school district is using a very small number of pregnancies and bad situations to usurp parents’ control over and relationship [...]

A positive outcome for the law of unintended consequences

Before 9/11, when the Taliban were still a concern to people of all good will, I remember seeing news reports and hearing stories about the horrors of life for women under the Taliban. They were, quite literally, trapped in their homes, unable to go out even fully covered. A logical by-product was a [...]

Is it really a correct diagnosis?

I’m about to write something provocative, so feel free to beat me up on it, provided that you do so politely. It’s about the increasing prevalence of Asbergers diagnoses amongst children. Asbergers is a rather amorphous condition, although it’s considered to be part of the Autism spectrum. Here’s the definition from one [...]

The indoctrination is only sort of working

The global warming indoctrination is working — up to a point.  In common with the school children in this John Stossel video, my children are worried about a climate change Armageddon and are hostile to Western culture because “it’s all our fault.”  It’s a common topic of conversation.  Hot days, cold days, nature shows — [...]

Aversion therapy

Old friends of mine used to joke that, once their children become teenagers, they’d start smoking so that their children could rebel against them by not smoking.  They might have been on to something.  In my home, where Mr. Bookworm likes TV very much, what I often hear from the kids is “Please don’t make [...]

Parents, you continue to be unnecessary

When the Progressive state is done, parents will have become obsolete, with children being created in test tubes and raised by the Government.  How else to explain this, which again uses a fringe group of examples to legislate away the average person’s (and, in this case, the average parent’s) rights.
Hat tip:  Drudge

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Catch ‘em being good

I used to have the worst children in the world. Truly, I did. And I knew that they were the worst children in the world because the evidence came out of my own mouth. I had to criticize them constantly because of the way they ignored instructions, the way they broke rules, [...]

Boys will not be boys

Last month, when a Colorado school issued an edict banning tag because someone might get emotionally hurt, I did a long post about how I thought the long-term consequences of that decision were infinitely worse than the short term issue of kids having a playground conflict. In the last couple of paragraphs of that [...]

It’s happened before; it can happen again

Muslims have a history of targeting their enemies children. One of the worst acts of Islamic violence against children occurred under Arafat’s old PLO in 1970:
Nahariya/Avivim School Bus Attack, 1970
On May 8, 1970 there was a brutal attack on an Israeli school bus by Palestinian terrorists who crossed the Lebanese border.
Avivim, an agricultural community [...]

I wonder who did it?

What kind of sick person explodes a nail bomb outside of a school?  Right now, we don’t know, but police in Liverpool are looking for the man who did it.  Fortunately, no one was hurt, but it’s so easy to think of the damage that could have been inflicted.  Since this was a fairly small [...]

Another entry in the Brave New World annals

First there were wrongful birth lawsuits tied to botched abortions.  Now there is a wrongful birth lawsuit tied to over-enthusiastic in vitro fertilization:
SYDNEY — A lesbian couple are seeking damages from their doctor after one gave birth to twins after fertility treatment, rather than a single baby.
The women, who cannot be named, are suing Robert [...]