Recently in Children Category

Child abuse takes many ghostly forms and has a multiplicity of fathers.  I can still remember, decades later, the one time I was enticed by an older man and how the awful hauntings of that dungeon-like experience still threaten me today.

We must always teach our children universal ideas.  The temptation to "corridor" teach them -- instead of bending young minds open to other doorways for learning -- is a national failing of a teaching philosophy.

What happens to a free nation and a freedom of spirit when the economy is so bad families are forced to go on food stamps in order to survive? Freedom dies in growling stomachs.

Can you decipher the gibberish in the title of today's post? If you under 15-years-old you certainly can. If you're over 40 -- you might need a clue.

We know how to textually laugh but do we understand the tenets of basic colloquial textual conversation? The New York Times recently reported kids are going crazy with SMS "texting" on their cellular phones and creating their own sub-language to thwart parental control and direct observation:

In a survey released 18 months ago, AT&T found that among 1,175 parents the company interviewed, nearly half learned how to text-message from their children. More than 60 percent of parents agreed that it helped them communicate, but that sometimes children didn’t want to hear their voice at all. When asked if their children wanted a call or a text message requesting that they be home by curfew, for instance, 58 percent of parents said their children preferred a text.

Is SMS texting degrading proper English -- or is it enhancing the way we communicate with each other? Should “texting” even be considered a word? Or is "texting" now a language -- with its own style, grammar, structure and context -- that should be studied, taught and honored as a part of a whole new cultural revolution?

With the Governor of New York spending $80,000 on hookers -- should we be surprised to learn 25% of teenage American girls are infected with human papillomavirus (HPV), chlamydia, genital herpes and trichomoniasis? If you're a Black female teenager, your infection rate is 50%.

Is it an evolutionary necessity that all babies are born selfish and power-seeking?

Is it possible for the young to survive in the world without a "me first" attitude and a need to create their own power dyads that places them at the center of attention at the power core? If children require selfishness and power to survive, where then, does one draw the line between spoiling the child and creating the independent adult? At what age -- or during which milestone -- must the cord be forever cut to avoid the result of the ordinary, meandering, narcissistic, tepid, adult?

If the correction from selfishness and power-seeking is never healed in childhood -- what becomes of the adult -- and how can the rest of us avoid be punished for the child abuse perpetuated on babies that wrongly place them, and others like them, at the center of an inhuman universe where they can do no wrong while the sun rises and sets on their shrugging shoulders?

If you change the label of a concept, is the context forming the underlying concept changed as well -- or is the concept always the same no matter the name?

Twenty years ago if you were a "child of divorce" you were branded in the community as a "child from a broken home." That's a pretty heavy label to stick on a young kid.  Not only is the home broken but -- by association of the semiotic -- the child is damaged as well. Being "from a broken home" was never a good thing, it was never an honor, and the phrase unfairly condemned the child with a chaining to immoral parents. I have recently been hearing a new label that appears to have finally, if only colloquially, replaced the harsh "from a broken home" label -- and that new phrase is -- "a child from a single mother." Now, if we accept the notion that as a society progresses and enlightenment abounds, and newer, kinder, labels are created to replace harsher ones, my question becomes this: Does being "from a single mother" -- even if she's divorced -- have less moral condemnation and pointed bearing in the community today than yesterday's meme of being "from a broken home?" If yes, how did this change propagate -- if not, why not? Can you think of other new labels created to replace older brandings that may not really be kinder -- or more morally acceptable -- than past common usage in society?

Is the purpose of prison to punish or to reform?

There are disturbing trends across the world that suggests prisons have become warehouses of punishment and despair that violate the basic terms of human dignity. Not a lot of good is coming into prisons or leaving prisons on parole. 

We are living in dark times as radical religiosity the world over rises to punish ordinary, innocent, citizens in representative democracies where government-legislated values of faith are made to reform the law of the land in the name of a niche morality that presumes the best interest of the majority.

We all know How Agriculture Ruined the World, but did you know by 2008 half the world will live in cities? That is a cold, blunt, fact that makes us all smaller.