Love
-
Kids Online: Teaching Them Right and Wrong in a Grey World
It can be a jungle and a nightmare out there in the Internet world, and our children are being targeted and targeting more and more frequently as technology becomes easier by the minute. Dosomething.org, an organization for teens and social change, reports that 43 percent of kids have been bullied online, and identity theft protection company LifeLock.com states youth as the fastest growing demographic for credit and identity fraud. The World Wide Web can be as wonderful as it is horrible for children and parents. After all, never in the history of the world have we had access to a world of information at the click of a button.…
-
Community: Charitable Hearts
“Intense love does not measure, it just gives.” ~Mother Teresa In Columbia, South Carolina there is a family with three children. Davis, age 11; Julia, age 9 and William, age 6. In October of 2012, the Hickson family participated in the UMDF Energy For Life Walk (Charlotte). They did the walk as a family in support of one another and most importantly for their son, William. William was diagnosed with a Mitochondrial Disease at age 18 months. During his six years he has already undergone six (6) surgeries, from hip surgeries (both) to Nissen fundoplication surgery (two different occasions) as well as a biopsy to confirm his mitochondrial disease.…
-
PARENTING: It Takes a Village…of Good Listeners
I have started and restarted this piece three times. I have talked with professionals. I have made pages of notes and looked at it from a teacher’s perspective (I spent five years teaching high school). I also tried the political perspective and the psychological perspective. The more perspectives that I try to see, the more I write and then I only end up with more unanswered questions. Finally, I decided to scrap all of the other points of view and focus solely on the parents’ perspective. My perspective. I want to think about what I have done and will continue to do with my children. My ultimate hope is…
-
Thank You Notes – Why Good Manners Are Always in Style
Do you get your children to write thank you notes? While they might relish the thought of writing thank you notes about as much as a trip to the dentist, it’s worth teaching our kids that thanks and appreciation cost nothing and mean a great deal. It’s never too early to start teaching our kids good manners. Kids might groan at the prospect of sitting down and writing a thank you note so it often helps to explain why a thank you note is important. Someone took time out of their day to choose a present, purchase it with their own money, wrap it, choose a card and send it.…
-
Reflections: Dropping the Stones
On a soul level there is an inner reckoning that takes place during the holidays. Regardless of whether or not we honor the process, the season grants a pause of contemplation in which we take stock. Specific to this is a measure of our year’s gains, and too a more sullen depth awareness of losses or sacrifices that may have been at stake. We quietly account, if we take the pause to consider within. This is part of the human rhythm which inter-webs us all, and natural as the flux of the seasons or regularity of the here-then-gone-again moon. This year’s reflection seemed to have repeated expression, or in other words, a…
-
Artist Robin Kaplan
It is easy to walk into the children’s section of a bookstore and get lost in the magical worlds that the authors and illustrators create. That has always been a favorite pastime of mine to do with my young daughter. There is something special about opening up a beautifully illustrated children’s book for the first time. The ability to illustrate in such a way takes practice and a natural ability to create such worlds. Robin Kaplan is such an illustrator and she will be releasing her first book with Penguin, a young reader’s edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which is coming out February 2nd. Robin is also…