Children

Kid rock: meet an 8-year-old bouldering champ

Kate Harding — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:18:00 PST

Quote of the Day: "When I started, I just had sneakers, but now I'm sponsored by Evolv, so they gave me my favorite shoes, which are called Optimus Prime, who is the best and nicest Transformer." -- 8-year-old rock climber Ashima Shiraishi.

FBI rescues 52 child prostitutes

Tracy Clark-Flory — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:01:00 PDT

It took 72 hours and 1,599 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers to rescue 52 children across the country from prostitution. While we're talking numbers, here's another important one: 10. As in 10 years old, the age of the youngest kid found in the nationwide sweep. The sting, innocuously dubbed Operation Cross Country IV, also secured the arrest of nearly 700 suspects, including 60 pimps, the FBI announced Monday.

I moved cross-country with Mr. Wrong

Cary Tennis — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:24:00 PDT

Dear Cary,

My bad mother is your good mother

Amy Benfer — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:20:00 PDT

We like to think of "good parenting" as a set of rules built in common sense and human decency, the kind of thing that should be universal, rather than subject to fashion or trends. Yet scratch the surface and all of us know that is manifestly false. The single biggest thing upper-middle-class suburban parents of "Mad Men" and John Cheever stories (with their highballs, drunk driving and wayward dry-cleaner bags) may have in common with their '70s counterparts (peddling "Free to Be You and Me" and natural foods) or today's much-maligned "helicopter parents" (obsessing over private preschools and stranger danger) is that each group was probably more complicated than their stereotype. And when you extend those differences across class, region or even country, the differences become even wider.

Should a teenager sail the globe?

Kate Harding — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:20:00 PDT

Kids these days! If they're not shoplifting or sexting, they're insisting on solo circumnavigating the globe. On Sunday, Australian 16-year-old Jessica Watson departed Sydney Harbor on a pink yacht, aiming to become the youngest person to sail around the world nonstop and unassisted. Last summer, American Zac Sunderland completed a similar trip at age 17, holding a world record for all of six weeks before the U.K.'s Mike Perham unseated him. In August, a Dutch court forbade 13-year-old Laura Dekker from setting out on her own round-the-world journey. (Previously, she'd been taken from her parents temporarily after they let her cross the North Sea alone.) It's madness! Next thing you know, parents are going to actually let their 6-year-olds take solo balloon flights, instead of just pretending it happened accidentally.

Come to school, collect $100!

Amy Benfer — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:14:00 PDT

Education is one of those values that just about everyone agrees is a good thing. But how do you keep kids interested in school? Do you make classes more interesting and hire good teachers? Draw up stricter standards to objectively measure "accomplishment" and hold students and teachers accountable for meeting them? How about just paying off the kids that meet your standards, regardless of what those standards might be?

Keeping kids safe after Columbine -- at what cost?

Kate Harding — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 09:01:00 PDT

After 10 years of refusing to speak publicly about the Columbine High School massacre, in which her son Dylan and his partner, Eric Harris, killed 13 people and themselves, Susan Klebold has written an essay about it for the forthcoming issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. "I'd had no inkling of the battle Dylan was waging in his mind," Klebold writes, explaining that she could only begin to understand her son's final actions when she recognized the extent of his own death wish. "Once I saw his journals, it was clear to me that Dylan entered the school with the intention of dying there. And so in order to understand what he might have been thinking, I started to learn all I could about suicide."

Storytime: Children tell their own tales

Introduction by Daniel Handler — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:07:00 PDT

As a children's author, I am often accused of being a child at heart, and while my standard reply -- "Are you saying that my wife is a pedophile?" -- tends to silence my attackers, there's something about the charge that sticks, as many a party will find me in the backyard chatting with its youngest guests. I swear to God (i.e., Beverly Cleary) that I’m not there because I subscribe to the specious and lunkheaded notion that children are unspoiled spouters of true wisdom. (Let's mothball that idea, next to the one that African-Americans are inherently rhythmic and Latinas can't be on the Supreme Court.) I'm merely looking for the most interesting conversationalists. If I could find an adult icebreaking with "Last night I dreamed I was a horse" or "Tree frogs have big eyes," I'd drink with them instead.

Brooke Shields: Victim of child porn?

Tracy Clark-Flory — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:01:00 PDT

Is a photograph of a 10-year-old girl sitting naked in a bubble bath child porn? Though it's gotten some snap-happy parents in trouble, most reasonable people would say that it isn't. But what if the girl's eyes are lined with black kohl and her lips are painted a seductive deep red, and what if instead of sitting in the tub she is standing, twisting and arching her glistening wet adolescent torso to reflect the soft light that streams in the window -- then is it child porn?

Good luck raising that gender-neutral child

Tracy Clark-Flory — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 00:14:00 PDT

A Swedish couple has refused to reveal the sex of their 2-year-old to anyone -- except those on diaper duty. When word got out about their decision to eschew personal pronouns and sex-appropriate clothing, the parents made international headlines. The mother explained her thinking to the press: "It's cruel to bring a child into the world with a blue or pink stamp on their forehead."

Parents: Most of what you're doing is wrong

Lynn Harris — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:16:00 PDT

Parents, brace yourselves. No more feeling superior to your less enlightened counterparts, except maybe the ones on "Toddlers and Tiaras." When it comes to all those things you're "supposed" to be doing for your kids -- showering them with positive reinforcement, bulking up their self-esteem, exposing them to diverse environments, limiting TV to PBS -- well, you may in fact be doing them all wrong.

Warning: Baby lust can be fatal!

Amy Benfer — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 11:16:00 PDT

This week readers of the U.K. Guardian might be forgiven for thinking that baby lust has exceeded all reasonable bounds and quite possibly become a sociopathic condition. Two articles, within two days of one another, featured women for whom motherhood is quite literally a life or death proposition: The first, titled “Women Who Kill for Babies,” reviewed the cases of women who have murdered pregnant women, then stolen their fetuses from their wombs. The second, about women who risk their own lives in pursuit of an IVF pregnancy, claims that “women are risking death and bankruptcy in their desperation to become mothers.” Taken together, the two nearly scream out that we have reached the apex of the modern motherhood fetish: Dear God, women are killing and dying for babies!

The color-blind myth

Amy Benfer — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:01:00 PDT

Few things send me into a tizzy quite as quickly as hearing someone say they are so colorblind, they wouldn’t care if someone were brown or green or purple. Besides the obvious issues – equating brown skin with those not found in nature; hoping for damn sure that someone might notice if a green person walks into a bar – it seems to reduce the complexity of racism to its most bare-bones, least controversial aspects and gives the speaker a free pass to ignore its thorniest aspects by pretending real historical and cultural issues are no more complex than a box of Crayola crayons (which, as those of us who grew up in the '70s and '80s might remember contained a “flesh”-colored apricot-y pink crayon and a “burnt sienna” brown crayon.) And thus I was fascinated by a piece in this week’s Newsweek that shows, in part, the problems created when well-meaning parents of very young children rely on vague platitudes – “Everyone is equal,” “God made all of us” or “Under the skin, we’re all the same” – instead of explicitly talking about race.

I am arming my kid to the teeth

Mark Benjamin — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 03:20:00 PDT

I was a violent kid. More than anything, I loved to play war. In my basement, I built a sandbag foxhole out of stacked-up sofa pillows. I would hide inside and peer out at what I imagined were the smoking slopes of Iwo Jima, crawling with Japanese soldiers ready to fight to the death.

Some school districts won't show Obama speech

Alex Koppelman — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:30:00 PDT

The controversy over President Obama's planned address to U.S. public school children next week shows no signs of abating. In fact, in some places, it's heating up.

Obama is coming to indoctrinate your children

Alex Koppelman — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:01:00 PDT

Next week, President Obama will address the nation's public school children. They may or may not end up happy about it -- a lecture on why education's really important doesn't always go over so well -- but on the right, there's already a lot of unhappiness, and some accusations that the speech is really about politics and indoctrination.

The Christian adoption racket

Lynn Harris — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 10:03:00 PDT

We like to say that abortion opponents care about what happens to babies only until they're born. Well, turns out we might be wrong. In many cases they do care what happens post-partum -- far, far too much. In "Shotgun Adoption," a truly chilling investigative report in the current issue of the Nation, "Quiverfull" author Kathryn Joyce reveals that so-called (and taxpayer-funded) crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) often have an extreme-Christian agenda even more corrupt than using false pretenses and scare tactics to pressure women to continue challenging pregnancies. That is: They don't just coerce women to have children. They coerce women to give their children up.

Is it ever OK to tar your kid in print?

Amy Benfer — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 03:19:00 PDT

Cogito ergo sum, baby

Robert Burton — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 03:18:00 PDT

I confess the idea of babies carrying on philosophical investigations never crossed my mind until I met Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley. Gopnik, a cognitive scientist with cross-training in philosophy and common sense, has spent her career carefully and cleverly teasing out the previously unsuspected complexity of a baby's thoughts. In her new book, "The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life," Gopnik incisively and compassionately highlights the extraordinary range of mental capabilities of even the youngest child.

Born too soon

Katharine Mieszkowski — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 04:25:00 PDT

After years of trying to conceive, writer Vicki Forman's twins were finally coming. Way too early.