Bookworm Room

Tweet A little boy was having problems accepting his parents’ authority.  In response to simple, ordinary parental instructions (“take a bath,” “clear your place at the table,” “do your homework”), the little boy raised fierce opposition:  “I don’t want to,” “You’re not the boss of me,” “No one else I know has to.”  The parents [...]

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Tweet The sentiments in the article claiming pot is a parenting panacea aren’t that surprising.  Pot users have always touted marijuana’s benefits in the alternative press.  What’s a little surprising about this article, which claims that one man became an infinitely better parent because of his pot use, is that the New York Times published [...]

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Tweet Brain-Dead Teen, Only Capable Of Rolling Eyes And Texting, To Be Euthanized

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Tweet One of my favorite silly jokes goes as follows: A man runs into a friend.  “Oh, my God!” he says.  “I just made the most terrible Freudian slip.” His friend asks “What did you do?” The man answers, “Well, I was having lunch with my mother.  I meant to saying ‘Mom, please pass the [...]

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Tweet So much of parenting is about communication.  Because children listen with their hearts as well as their minds, that communication had better be honest.  If it’s not, your child will instantly know you for either a fool or a liar. Being honest, though, is not the same as being judgmental.  There is a time [...]

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Tweet Annals of motherhood, through the ages…. Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi:  The exemplar of Roman motherhood who, when quizzed by fellow Roman matrons over her simple dress, unlike their ostentatious attire asked to show her wealth, pointed to her sons and said “These are my jewels.” Ann Romney:  Mother of five, grandmother of eighteen, [...]

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Tweet I’ve been thinking (and if those aren’t ominous words, I don’t know what are).  I’ve been thinking about the Left’s attack on stay-at-home Mom’s, an attack that Hilary Rosen started, and that others have continued.  To refresh your recollection, let’s start with Rosen, who says that Ann Romney “has actually never worked a day [...]

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Tweet I’m seeing a terribly funny new meme on Facebook, aimed at explaining away Hilary Rosen’s statement that Ann Romney, who raised five children, fought breast cancer, and has MS, has never worked a day in her life. Friends are posting things to the effect that, while parenting is “work,” it’s not a “job.” From [...]

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Tweet 11B40 asked a good question, which is why I’m so focused on McQueary, when it was Sandusky who committed the crime.  It’s because I have no fellow feeling with Sandusky who, if the allegations are true, is a perverted monster.  I therefore don’t need to analyze my behavior or parenting decisions with regard to [...]

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Tweet Every time I return from a Navy League or Navy event, I lament the fact that we in the civilian world do not get to wear our honors and accomplishments on our hats, shoulders, chests or sleeves.  The fact that there is no official boasting mechanism in my suburban Mom life, though, doesn’t mean [...]

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Tweet It would be so nice if my children had inherited only my best qualities, plus their father’s best qualities too.  Then, they would have been brilliant, talented and gorgeous.  But that’s not how it worked out.  For one thing, they’ve got qualities, such as athleticism and self-discipline, that neither my husband nor I have.  [...]

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Tweet Sometimes the matched sets just write themselves.  Both of the articles I’m quoting here are from England.  The first in our set is an article saying that town councils across England are being told that they need to reinstate actual playgrounds.  The current versions, which are the kid equivalent of a padded room, are [...]

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Tweet My daughter started high school at our local public high.  It’s a great high school.  It’s got a beautiful facility, high quality staff, all the bells and whistles you can think of, an involved parent body, and a whole lot of very nice kids.  I always knew all that, but I had that information [...]

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Tweet In Marin County, spanking a child is a very dangerous activity.  Although spanking is not illegal, it’s enough to entangle you with Child Protective Services and, from that moment on, parenting life as you know it is over.  Despite the danger, when my kids were little, I spanked them.  With two unguided missiles, sometimes [...]

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Tweet Back in November 2007, I wrote a long post talking about the fact that I see a lot of children who are labeled as having Asperger’s (a subset of autism) but who seem instead (or also) to be the victims of profoundly bad parenting.  I noted that I have known over the years children [...]

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Tweet All of us have noted a trend, one that is especially prevalent in public schools, to insulate kids from losing.  I know that my kids’ public school, as part of its master plan, has instituted a policy by which the kids don’t do any competitive sports on campus in order to protect them from [...]

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Tweet I never thought about it, but I was running my house like a commune.  The kids had chores to do, of course, but the incentive was the greater good, my approbation, and an allowance that, in their minds, had no relationship to the tasks demanded.  The kids did not find these incentives inspiring, and [...]

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Tweet I would like your opinion. Mr. Bookworm thinks I’m taking “holier than thou-ness” to a nauseating (and hypocritical) extreme. I think he is on the verge of a parenting error. Here’s the deal: Mr. Bookworm came across an opportunity to obtain some stuff for the kids without actually going through the shopping process. Indeed, [...]

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Tweet Do you recall that, a couple of months ago, I wrote a lengthy post about the fact that the apparently benign sounding Child Protective Services has become a vicious scourge assaulting good parents because they’re easy targets? If you don’t recall that post, I recommend that you read it either before or after you [...]

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Tweet My daughter is a tween and is just starting to think that she is smart and I am stupid.  We therefore had a little talk this morning.  Or, rather, I gave her a short lecture.  I explained that, when I was young and my mother, like me, was in her late 40s, we used [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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Tweet Its official name is Child Protective Services (and most parents recognize its acronym, “CPS”), but I have to think that my post title more accurately describes it, especially when it’s aided by busy-bodies — people who don’t really want to help a situation, but who do want to cause a little excitement in their [...]

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Tweet We just discovered that one of my daughter’s “best” friends has been lying about her computer use to her parents. She tells them that she’s going to an approved kid website, such as Club Penguin, and then, when they’re not looking, goes surfing for sex sites. (Did I mention that she’s ten?)  My daughter, [...]

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Tweet For those of you who worry that pop culture, and not the parent, serves as the role model for children, think again.  This bizarre story shows that at least one Mom is helping her daughter achieve the mom’s goals: A Petaluma woman and her 16-year-old daughter were arrested on suspicion of shoplifting clothes together [...]

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Tweet 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 [...]

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