Things to Read - Six Interesting Articles From Around the Web (Teens Online, Criminal Lemonade, Generation Limbo, Time for Beauty, Outdoor Education, and the Chesapeake Bay)

1. (Teens Online)- 10 Things You Don't Know About Teens and Social Networking - lots of interesting quotes from real teens on how social networking effects their lives.

“My friendships are really affected by social networking. You have to constantly validate your friends online. And everyone’s like ‘Where were you?’ ‘What have you been doing?’ ‘Why haven’t you commented on my picture yet?’ So you have to be online all the time, just to keep track, so you don’t upset anyone.” --Jasmine, 13 years old

“Social networking affects all the things you do in real life now. Like, if you go to a party, one of the most important aspects of going to the party is to document yourself for online posts. You have to prove you were looking good, you were having fun, and that you were actually there! It’s not about the party anymore but about the pictures of the party.” --Caroline, 14 years old

. . . . Interesting.

2. (Criminal Lemonade) - The Battle Against Lemonade Stands - Apparently governments are cracking down on this time-honored tradition.

3. (Making Time for Beauty ) This short, wonderfully stated article from Anne Lamott stresses the need for "time spent quietly in beauty."

"I ask [my students], is there a eucalyptus grove at the end of their street, or a new exhibit at the art museum? An upcoming minus tide at the beach where the agates and tidepools are, or a great poet coming to the library soon? A pond where you can see so many turtles? A journal to fill?

If so, what manic or compulsive hours will they give up in trade for the equivalent time to write, or meander? Time is not free—that’s why it’s so precious and worth fighting for. "

(link via A Day That is Dessert).


4. (Generation Limbo). Should we keep encouraging student loans when there are no jobs to be found? The New York Times has an interesting article on recent college grads. According to the article, many many twenty-somethings are "resigned to waiting for the economic tides to turn." "Plenty of people work in bookstores and work in low-end administrative jobs, even though they have a Harvard degree. . . . They are thinking more in terms of creating their own kinds of life that interests them, rather than following a conventional idea of success and job security." According to one interviewee, "You have to make opportunities happen for yourself, and I think a lot of my classmates weren’t thinking in that way. . . It’s the equivalent of setting up your own lemonade stand.” This quote makes me feel oddly inspired. How about you?

5. (Outdoor education). Want Your Kids to Get Into Harvard? - Tell 'Em to Go Outside! How important is being outdoors for learning science? For most educators, not very important. According to one school administrator, "we’ve become so sophisticated in the teaching of science, that our students don’t have to go outside anymore.” Scary. And sad.

6. (CAFOs). The poor Chesapeake Bay, Dave Bard's article through the PEW Environmental Group explains the pollution problems caused by chicken CAFOs ("Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations").

Seven Interesting Articles from Around the Web (Brats in Public, Expensive Kids, The Problem with Teen Fiction, Happy Bees, Playground Safety, An Adult with Severe Allergies, and Abused Pigs)

1. (brats) - Permissive Parents: Curb your brats - I wanted to hate this article, but I think the author has a point. Though I'm aware that he might actually be writing about my own kids. Truthfully, I've gotten many more mean stares while disiplining my children in public then when ignoring them. What about everyone else? Here is one response to the brat article (link courtesy of The Evolving Homemaker). Personally I have a problem with using "kids as weapons" (though it is tempting at times) but to each her own.

2. (teen literature) - Has teen literature become too violent? In Darkness Too Visible
Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea? Meghan Cox Gurdon makes a great argument that it has (and as a mother of young children, I must admit that this article scared the hell out of me).

"The argument in favor of such novels is that they validate the teen experience, giving voice to tortured adolescents who would otherwise be voiceless. If a teen has been abused, the logic follows, reading about another teen in the same straits will be comforting. If a girl cuts her flesh with a razor to relieve surging feelings of self-loathing, she will find succor in reading about another girl who cuts, mops up the blood with towels and eventually learns to manage her emotional turbulence without a knife.

Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some young people endure; it is an argument for taking care."

3. (expensive kids) - Why do we spend so much money on our kids - is it necessary or are we just trying to keep up with the Jones? Read Blaire Briody's article in the Fiscal Times and make your own decision.

4. (an adult with food allergies) - Sandra Beasley's article in the Wall Street Journal discusses her life with food allergies. She also discusses her concerns regarding the future for the new generation of allergy sufferers -"manipulating shared adult environments with bans and 'free' zones does not help those with allergies learn to fend for themselves in the real world. This generation of children with food allergies will soon be a generation of rebellious teenagers with food allergies, navigating the world of late-night drunken Waffle House binges and ordering hash browns cooked on a griddle that may or may not have been scrubbed free of egg. Later they will be 20-something travelers with food allergies who find there are no peanut-free zones in Shanghai. Someday they will be 30-something parents with food allergies, handling toddlers who cannot grasp the peril of spilling milk on mom . . . . You can only protect us from so much. Dodging death is a daily mission for those of us with food allergies. Living our lives is another." I completely see her point, but on the same note ever since we found out about the severity of P's peanut allergy, the mere sight of peanut oil makes me sick, nervous, and more scared than any horror movie I've ever seen.

5. (happy bees) - The Atlantic's "A Way to Save America's Bees: Buy Free-Range Beef" explains a scientific study connecting livestock grazing areas and bee populations. Interesting.

6. (playground safety) - Are playgrounds too safe? Read this NY Times Article and decide for yourself.

7. (sad pigs) - Time Magazine has a great expose on the horrors of factory pig farming (stop reading right now if you have food in front of you) - "Piglets are casually tossed across pens from one handler to another (one worker says pigs are "bouncy") and those that are considered sickly or nonviable are slammed head-first on the floor — a quick and efficient way to kill them. Animals are castrated and their tails are docked — or cut off — with no anesthetic. In crowded conditions pigs tend to bite one another's tails, and neutered males are generally less aggressive. Sows forced to breed repeatedly suffer fatal and painful uterine prolapses, with their reproductive organs sometimes spilling out of their bodies. Females are also confined in gestation crates, which allow them to lie down but provide them too little room even to turn around." SO PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE BUY LOCAL FROM A FARM YOU TRUST! PLEASE! I'M BEGGING!

Things to Read - Six Interesting Articles from Around the Web (on Parenting, College, Superbugs, and the Revolution)

1 (college). Advice for the class of 2011 - what would you emphasize?

2 (college). What is the purpose of college? - I'm unclear myself right now.

3. (parenting). Lori Gottlieb's article How to Land Your Kid in Therapy (Why the obsession with our kids' happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods) in the Atlantic should be required reading for all parents. According to Gottlieb, a psychotherapist, she continually sees patients in their 20s or early 30s suffering from depression and anxiety who have "'awesome' parents . . . fabulous siblings, supportive friends, an excellent education, a cool job, good health, and a nice apartment." The influx of such patients lead Gottlieb to wonder if the problems of this generation stem from the fact that rather than having neglectful parents, these adults were raised by parents who had "done too much." As summarized by Gottlieb, "[h]ere I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?"

The article goes on to discuss other research on this topic. I especially found the comments of Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA, insightful. According to Bohn, "many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—'anything less than pleasant,' as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong."

"Consider a toddler who’s running in the park and trips on a rock, Bohn says. Some parents swoop in immediately, pick up the toddler, and comfort her in that moment of shock, before she even starts crying. But, Bohn explains, this actually prevents her from feeling secure—not just on the playground, but in life. If you don’t let her experience that momentary confusion, give her the space to figure out what just happened (Oh, I tripped), and then briefly let her grapple with the frustration of having fallen and perhaps even try to pick herself up, she has no idea what discomfort feels like, and will have no framework for how to recover when she feels discomfort later in life. These toddlers become the college kids who text their parents with an SOS if the slightest thing goes wrong, instead of attempting to figure out how to deal with it themselves. If, on the other hand, the child trips on the rock, and the parents let her try to reorient for a second before going over to comfort her, the child learns: That was scary for a second, but I’m okay now. If something unpleasant happens, I can get through it. In many cases, Bohn says, the child recovers fine on her own—but parents never learn this, because they’re too busy protecting their kid when she doesn’t need protection."

The article goes on to quote Barry Schwartz, a social scientist at Swathmore, "We want our kids to be happy living the life we envision for them—the banker who’s happy, the surgeon who’s happy" even though those professions “might not actually make them happy.” "We’re not so happy if our kids work at Walmart but show up each day with a smile on their faces,” Schwartz says. “They’re happy, but we’re not. Even though we say what we want most for our kids is their happiness, and we’ll do everything we can to help them achieve that, it’s unclear where parental happiness ends and our children’s happiness begins.”

The article concludes with the reminder (which I really should attach to a pinboard somewhere) that "[o]ur children are not our masterpieces." A great article, I highly suggest it (thank you, Julia, for the link!)

4 (superbugs). The Rise of Superbugs in the Atlantic - "Today, nearly 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to healthy farm animals. Drugs that can mean the difference between life and death in humans are routinely mixed into animal feed to make them grow faster and to compensate for unsanitary living conditions. It's a wasteful practice that squanders one of the most powerful tools of modern medicine." SCARY!!!

5 (the revolution). If you want to be depressed but educated, then you MUST read Chris Hedges's Endgame Strategy on why the revolution must start in America. "The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more. They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will use their money to hide in gated compounds when it all implodes. Do not expect them to take care of us when it starts to unravel. We will have to take care of ourselves. We will have to rapidly create small, monastic communities where we can sustain and feed ourselves. It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out. It is either that or become drones and serfs in a global corporate dystopia. It is not much of a choice. But at least we still have one."

6 (parenting). How to Talk to Little Girls "Ask her what she's reading. What does she like and dislike, and why? There are no wrong answers. You're just generating an intelligent conversation that respects her brain. For older girls, ask her about current events issues: pollution, wars, school budgets slashed. What bothers her out there in the world? How would she fix it if she had a magic wand? You may get some intriguing answers. Tell her about your ideas and accomplishments and your favorite books. Model for her what a thinking woman says and does."

Things to Read - 3 Great Articles on How Kids Learn

*According to this Slate article, new research evidences that when teachers show children how a toy works the children are less likely to discover different things about the toy then when they explore the toy on their own. Apparently kids will often just mimmic the teacher's directions even when more novel uses exist. According to the article, "[d]irect instruction really can limit young children's learning. Teaching is a very effective way to get children to learn something specific—this tube squeaks, say, or a squish then a press then a pull causes the music to play. But it also makes children less likely to discover unexpected information and to draw unexpected conclusions." Makes sense to me.

*According to this Newsweek article for the first time ever U.S. "creativity" is declining, with the fastest decline occurring in children aged kindergarten through 6th grade. This is not a good thing, especially since other countries (including China) are making creativity a focus of their educational systems.

*This Huffington Post article summarizes new research which "found that Bright Girls, when given something to learn that was particularly foreign or complex, were quick to give up; the higher the girls' IQ, the more likely they were to throw in the towel. In fact, the straight-A girls showed the most helpless responses. Bright boys, on the other hand, saw the difficult material as a challenge, and found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts rather than give up." Why is this? According to the author, "Most likely, it has to do with the kinds of feedback we get from parents and teachers as young children. Girls, who develop self-control earlier and are better able to follow instructions, are often praised for their 'goodness.' When we do well in school, we are told that we are 'so smart,' 'so clever,' or 'such a good student.' This kind of praise implies that traits like smartness, cleverness and goodness are qualities you either have or you don't. Boys, on the other hand, are a handful. Just trying to get boys to sit still and pay attention is a real challenge for any parent or teacher. As a result, boys are given a lot more feedback that emphasizes effort (e.g., 'If you would just pay attention you could learn this,' 'If you would just try a little harder you could get it right.') The net result: When learning something new is truly difficult, girls take it as sign that they aren't 'good' and 'smart,' and boys take it as a sign to pay attention and try harder."

*For two more great articles on how best to educate kids (and the importance of "play"), click here and scroll down to the bottom of the post.

*And since my Nurture Shock post received quite a few hits, I thought I'd forward along this Snoburbia post on how race is addressed in the "snoburbs", which I found very interesting (and true).