Triple The Dad

Just more evidence that taking a breather and giving your kids a little room to play on their own is good advice:   A new study suggests stressed parents result in obese kids. Why?  Well, the study suggests stressed out parents frequent fast-food joints more and are less inclined to plan organized meals.  Which makes sense.  Its hard to make food to feed two or three kids when you are busy ferrying them each to 3 sports or activities. What can you do to stop the stress?  Stop trying to make your child the next Einstein or LeBron James.  Yes, you want to provide every opportunity available, but your child's genes set in concrete when sperm met egg.  No amount of after-school activities will make a child with a 95 IQ the next Stephen Hawking nor your short, slow child an NFL wide receiver.  Relax and enjoy who your child is, rather than worrying about what they will become.  Ninety five percent of your role in who your chi...

The following italized quotes are from an article on Slate.com regarding children and the internet.  Katie Rophe interviewed danah boyd, and honestly, because I don't know how to say it any better, I'll just put exclamation points on her ideas (all formatting mine): The idea of shutting out sex for as long as possible, protecting kids by not exposing them to it, may not be the perfect solution. "My feeling is that we do a disservice to young people by setting up pornography as forbidden 'adult' materials, thus making them hugely desirable. From my perspective, we need to prep young people to critically encounter this material long before they do." Her argument that we should give them the apparatus to interrogate this material, rather than subscribing to the fantasy that we can shield them from it. Yes. And in fact, she argues that, on close examination, many of our cultural anxieties about what happens to kids online are based more on parents' im...