parenting
kkrisberg | June 6, 2014Researcher Christopher Wildeman has spent his whole career describing and quantifying the more unpleasant parts of people’s lives and his latest study on the surprising prevalence of childhood maltreatment is no exception. Still, there is a bit of a silver lining, he told me.
“This is the sort of issue that both the right and left shouldn’t have a hard time supporting,” said Wildeman, an assistant professor of sociology at Yale University. “It’s the sort of thing that once we become more aware of it, designing interventions that could diminish maltreatment rates is something anyone can get…
sastyk | May 8, 2012Speaking as someone with kids who pretty much are Alligators All Around and Wild Things most of the time, I'm going to miss him. Thanks, Maurice, for the books that fed my childhood and now the childhood of all the kids I love!
sastyk | August 4, 2011I didn't expect to like _Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother_ - in fact, I expected to hate it. Instead, I found it funny, charming and moving - and give Amy Chua a lot of credit for having the ovaries to expose herself. I didn't just like the book, I loved it.
If that seems strange, give me a minute to explain before you assume I'm secretly Mommy Dearest ;-). I should note that I am not a Tiger parent, although Chua and I perhaps have more in common than you might think. You see, like Chua, I don't necessarily think that that assumptions of western parenting are always right. Like Chua, I…
sastyk | July 13, 2011There's an article about a couple of recent cases charging people (read: mothers) with neglect if they (gasp!) dare to go to sleep around their children.
A couple of weeks ago in Delaware, a woman put her 3-year-old down for a nap and then took a nap herself. The 3-year-old got up and somehow escaped the house. After the girl was found, police charged her mother with child endangerment.
In New York, a woman's 3-year-old son got up in the middle of the night and wandered around. The woman woke up at some point and called the police. A man who had spotted the child had already called police.…
sastyk | February 1, 2011Note: I wrote this piece in 2009, when my boys were younger. By now they chop food for dinner, Isaiah can indeed use the hatchet and Simon and Isaiah have their own flocks of birds, and the sale of any eggs they raise. The general principles are still the same. We still don't give allowances per se, but allow the children to do extra labor to earn money, over and above the chores they do simply because they live here. I found myself thinking about this book in the context of the discussion around the "Tiger Mother" book that advocates all of children's attention be focused on purely…
sastyk | April 16, 2010Hat tip to Rod Dreher for pointing out what he deems the most depressing toy ever - yes, your little one can have his or her own cubicle! Has your two year old been falling down on the hard, tedious job of being a child - here's a way of ensuring that she's ready for a life of dismal monotony!
Now you can make home more like the office, enhance the number of hours of screen time (children between 2 and 5 years old only get a measly 32.5 hours of screen time per day on average, gotta get those numbers up!) and bring Dilbert to life for your child.
It is every parent's dream!
Sharon
jstemwedel | March 26, 2010Earlier this week, the younger Free-Ride offspring "made a bad decision" about time utilization at the after school program, electing to play outside and do a project before doing homework, meaning the homework was still unfinished when I arrived to fetch the sprogs.
The standard consequence for this is, apparently, one of the greatest horrors that can be visited upon a third grader: the loss of screen-time (which in the Free-Ride household covers television, computers, and hand-held game systems).
Through angry tears, the younger Free-Ride offspring responded to this travesty thusly:…
grrlscientist | February 7, 2010tags: gay adoption, United States, equality, religion, children, religion, hypocrisy, Dan+Savage, streaming video
Unlike straight parents, gay parents cannot go out one night, get drunk and adopt. Unlike straight parents, gay parents have children because they are wanted and planned for. Certainly this was the situation for my (straight) so-called parents, who not only didn't plan for me and didn't want me, but they were horribly abusive and neglectful after I was born, and after they'd finished trying to destroy me, they gave me up to the state when I was a teen-ager. I would love to have…
sciencewoman | July 16, 2009Don't worry I'll be back to the course design series soon, but I spent yesterday focused on other things (paper revisions, grant proposals) and I haven't completed the necessary work to get the next post up. And it's Friday, so let's divert to lighter equally serious but different topics.
As the mother of a toddler daughter I've been struggling with the overt patriarchy of the classic Disneyfied fairy tales, in which a stereotypically beautiful damsel in distress is helpless until rescued by a prince. I'd been trying to avoid exposing my daughter to the princess stories (Cinderella, Sleeping…
sciencewoman | July 1, 2009In January 2008, a reader (Serious Scientist) sent me a query about dealing with inlaws who thought she should give up on her scientific career when her baby arrived. They wanted her to go to a baby shower across the country, without her husband, and she was dreading the trip and the questions and judgements that would certainly arrive during the party. I encourage you all to look back into the archives and read her original letter, and the wonderful advice everyone offered to Serious Scientist.
Serious's letter, even buried back in the archives, has generated a couple of recent comments.…
sciencewoman | May 13, 2009A loyal reader of the blog sent me a copy of an article in the spring edition of the LTER Network News. In the article (pdf here
), Laura Gough discusses how her research at the Toolik Lake field site in northern Alaska helped prepare her for the joys and challenges of parenting. Dr. Gough is a plant ecologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, who is currently serving as the NSF Program Director for Environmental Biology. In the article linked above, Gough stresses that acceptance of tedium, flexibility, preparation, and stopping to appreciate simple joys are the parallel skills that…