“
Don't be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It's the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.
”
”
Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1))
“
You cannot count on the physical proximity of someone you love, all the time. A seed that sprouts at the foot of its parent tree remains stunted until it is transplanted. Rama will be in my care, and he will be quite well. But ultimately, he will leave me too. Every human being, when the time comes, has to depart to seek his fulfillment in his own way.
”
”
Vālmīki (The Ramayana)
“
Don’t you want to know my name?” the boy asks.
“Names are not of nearly as much import as people like to suppose,” the man in the grey suit says. “A label assigned to identify you either by this institution or your departed parents is neither of interest nor value to me. If you find you are in need of a name at any point, you may choose one for yourself. For now it will not be necessary.
”
”
Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
“
From her thighs, she gives you life
And how you treat she who gives you life
Shows how much you value the life given to you by the Creator.
And from seed to dust
There is ONE soul above all others --
That you must always show patience, respect, and trust
And this woman is your mother.
And when your soul departs your body
And your deeds are weighed against the feather
There is only one soul who can save yours
And this woman is your mother.
And when the heart of the universe
Asks her hair and mind,
Whether you were gentle and kind to her
Her heart will be forced to remain silent
And her hair will speak freely as a separate entity,
Very much like the seaweed in the sea --
It will reveal all that it has heard and seen.
This woman whose heart has seen yours,
First before anybody else in the world,
And whose womb had opened the door
For your eyes to experience light and more --
Is your very own MOTHER.
So, no matter whether your mother has been cruel,
Manipulative, abusive, mentally sick, or simply childish
How you treat her is the ultimate test.
If she misguides you, forgive her and show her the right way
With simple wisdom, gentleness, and kindness.
And always remember,
That the queen in the Creator's kingdom,
Who sits on the throne of all existence,
Is exactly the same as in yours.
And her name is,
THE DIVINE MOTHER.
”
”
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
“
The Children's Hour
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day's occupations,
That is known as the Children's Hour.
I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.
From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.
A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.
A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!
They climb up into my turret
O'er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.
They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!
Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!
I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.
And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!
”
”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (The Complete Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
“
People thought I was one of those people who beats their kid in department stores.” “Don’t be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It’s the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.
”
”
Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1))
“
But my parents had taught me that everybody deserved respect, no matter if they were pansies or not, and to tell the truth, I was nothing to write home about in the physical looks department.
”
”
Robert McCammon (Boy's Life)
“
But when the people who gave you life have departed this earth, you enter a strange new corridor of detachment. You are untethered, disconnected from the two story lines that gave birth to your one.
”
”
Cicely Tyson (Just as I Am)
“
When I have not rage or sorrow, and you depart from me, then I am most afraid. When the belly is full, and the mind has its sayings, then I fear for my soul; I rush to you as a child at night breaks into its parents' room. Do not forget me in my satisfaction. When the heart grins at itself, the world is destroyed. And I am found alone with the husks and the shells. Then the dangerous moment comes: I am too great to ask for help. I have other hopes. I legislate from the fortress of my disappointments, with a set jaw. Overthrow this even terror with a sweet remembrance: when I was with you, when my soul delighted you, when I was what you wanted. My heart sings of your longing for me, and my thoughts climb down to marvel at your mercy. I do not fear as you gather up my days. Your name is the sweetness of time, and you carry me close into the night, speaking consolations, drawing down lights from the sky, saying, See how the night has no terror for one who remembers the Name.
”
”
Leonard Cohen (Book of Mercy)
“
The job of every generation is to discover the flaws of the one that came before it. That's part of growing up, figuring out all the ways your parents and their friends are broken. So pity the first people to reach puberty after a zombie apocalypse, who would have some truly heavy lifting in this department...You become whatever they fear the most. Now THAT'S evolution
”
”
Justine Larbalestier (Zombies Vs. Unicorns)
“
Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja's gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable.
”
”
Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
“
Even before i had children, I knew that being a parent was going to be challenging as well as rewarding. But I didn't really know.
I didn't know how exhausted it was possible to become, or how clueless it was possible to feel, or how, each time I reached the end of my rope, I would somehow have to find more rope.
I didn't understand that sometimes when your kids scream so loudly that the neighbors are ready to call the Department of Child Services, it's because you've served the wrong shape of pasta for dinner.
I didn't realize that those deep-breathing exercises mothers are taught in natural-childbirth class dont really start to pay off until long after the child is out.
I couldn't have predicted how relieved I'd be to learn that other peoples children struggle with the same issues, and act in some of the same ways, mine do. (Even more liberating is the recognition that other parents, too, have dark moments when they catch themselves not liking their own child, or wondering whether it's all worth it, or entertaining various other unspeakable thoughts).
The bottom line is that raising kids is not for whimps.
”
”
Alfie Kohn (Unconditional Parenting: Moving from Rewards and Punishments to Love and Reason)
“
On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012:
We're not going to have a supreme court that will overturn Roe versus Wade. There will be no more Antonio Scalias and Samuel Aleatos added to this court. We're not going to repeal health reform. Nobody is going to kill medicare and make old people in this generation or any other generation fight it out on the open market to try to get health insurance. We are not going to do that. We are not going to give a 20% tax cut to millionaires and billionaires and expect programs like food stamps and kid's insurance to cover the cost of that tax cut. We'll not make you clear it with your boss if you want to get birth control under the insurance plan that you're on. We are not going to redefine rape. We are not going to amend the United States constitution to stop gay people from getting married. We are not going to double Guantanamo. We are not eliminating the Department of Energy or the Department of Education or Housing at the federal level. We are not going to spend $2 trillion on the military that the military does not want. We are not scaling back on student loans because the country's new plan is that you should borrow money from your parents. We are not vetoing the Dream Act. We are not self-deporting. We are not letting Detroit go bankrupt. We are not starting a trade war with China on Inauguration Day in January. We are not going to have, as a president, a man who once led a mob of friends to run down a scared, gay kid, to hold him down and forcibly cut his hair off with a pair of scissors while that kid cried and screamed for help and there was no apology, not ever. We are not going to have a Secretary of State John Bolton. We are not bringing Dick Cheney back. We are not going to have a foreign policy shop stocked with architects of the Iraq War. We are not going to do it. We had the chance to do that if we wanted to do that, as a country. and we said no, last night, loudly.
”
”
Rachel Maddow
“
The greatest legacy a father can leave for his children before he departs is PEACE, otherwise his properties will go in PIECES sooner that he dies.
”
”
Israelmore Ayivor
“
The world's major religions: Same boss, different departments.
”
”
David R. Wommack
“
If you have read this far in the chronicle of the Baudelaire orphans - and I certainly hope you have not - then you know we have reached the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history, and so you know the end is near, even though this chapter is so lengthy that you might never reach the end of it. But perhaps you do not yet know what the end really means. "The end" is a phrase which refers to the completion of a story, or the final moment of some accomplishment, such as a secret errand, or a great deal of research, and indeed this thirteenth volume marks the completion of my investigation into the Baudelaire case, which required much research, a great many secret errands, and the accomplishments of a number of my comrades, from a trolley driver to a botanical hybridization expert, with many, many typewriter repairpeople in between. But it cannot be said that The End contains the end of the Baudelaires' story, any more than The Bad Beginning contained its beginning. The children's story began long before that terrible day on Briny Beach, but there would have to be another volume to chronicle when the Baudelaires were born, and when their parents married, and who was playing the violin in the candlelit restaurant when the Baudelaire parents first laid eyes on one another, and what was hidden inside that violin, and the childhood of the man who orphaned the girl who put it there, and even then it could not be said that the Baudelaires' story had not begun, because you would still need to know about a certain tea party held in a penthouse suite, and the baker who made the scones served at the tea party, and the baker's assistant who smuggled the secret ingredient into the scone batter through a very narrow drainpipe, and how a crafty volunteer created the illusion of a fire in the kitchen simply by wearing a certain dress and jumping around, and even then the beginning of the story would be as far away as the shipwreck that leftthe Baudelaire parents as castaways on the coastal shelf is far away from the outrigger on which the islanders would depart. One could say, in fact, that no story really has a beginning, and that no story really has an end, as all of the world's stories are as jumbled as the items in the arboretum, with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it. We might even say that the world is always in medias res - a Latin phrase which means "in the midst of things" or "in the middle of a narrative" - and that it is impossible to solve any mystery, or find the root of any trouble, and so The End is really the middle of the story, as many people in this history will live long past the close of Chapter Thirteen, or even the beginning of the story, as a new child arrives in the world at the chapter's close. But one cannot sit in the midst of things forever. Eventually one must face that the end is near, and the end of The End is quite near indeed, so if I were you I would not read the end of The End, as it contains the end of a notorious villain but also the end of a brave and noble sibling, and the end of the colonists' stay on the island, as they sail off the end of the coastal shelf. The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now.
”
”
Lemony Snicket (The End (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #13))
“
All this waiting.
Waiting for the rain to
stop. Waiting in traffic.
Waiting for the bill.
Waiting at the airport
for an old friend.
Waiting to depart.
Then,
there’s the big waiting:
waiting to grow up. Waiting
for love. Waiting to show your
your parents that when you
have kids you’ll be different.
Waiting to retire. Waiting for
death.
Why do we think waiting
is the antithesis of life
when it is almost
all of it?
”
”
Kamand Kojouri
“
Why didn't you go with your parents?" I shouted at Michael.
"Because I knew they were all right!" he shouted back, fixing his eyes on me. "I wasn't so sure about you! I couldn't call on you after your arrest. All I could do was vouch for you."
I blinked. "You vouched for me?" New Victorians charged with crimes could get out of paying bail or remaining imprisoned if they had someone powerful and aristocratic enough to speak on their behalf.
"Yes! Didn't you parents tell you? I met them at the courthouse the day your counsel summoned them."
I shook my head, and committed a note to memory: If parents survive, kill them.
”
”
Lia Habel (Dearly, Departed (Gone With the Respiration, #1))
“
Names are not of nearly as much import as people like to suppose,” the man in the grey suit says. “A label assigned to identify you either by this institution or your departed parents is neither of interest nor value to me. If you find you are in need of a name at any point, you may choose one for yourself. For now it will not be necessary.
”
”
Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
“
Only in Xanth would parents see a dragon looming over their children and depart with confidence.
”
”
Piers Anthony (Yon Ill Wind (Xanth, #20))
“
When life deals you a crap hand in the parent department, the best way to thumb your nose at fate was to end up with an even better family, one you created yourself.
”
”
Roxy Mews (Love's a Witch (Hart Clan Hybrids, #2))
“
In reality, the damned are in the same place as the saved—in reality! But they hate it; it is their Hell. The saved love it, and it is their Heaven. It is like two people sitting side by side at an opera or a rock concert: the very thing that is Heaven to one is Hell to the other. Dostoyevski says, 'We are all in paradise, but we won’t see it'…Hell is not literally the 'wrath of God.' The love of God is an objective fact; the 'wrath of God' is a human projection of our own wrath upon God, as the Lady Julian saw—a disastrous misinterpretation of God’s love as wrath. God really says to all His creatures, 'I know you and I love you' but they hear Him saying, 'I never knew you; depart from me.' It is like angry children misinterpreting their loving parents’ affectionate advances as threats. They project their own hate onto their parents’ love and experience love as an enemy—which it is: an enemy to their egotistic defenses against joy…
Since God is love, since love is the essence of the divine life, the consequence of loss of this life is loss of love...Though the damned do not love God, God loves them, and this is their torture. The very fires of Hell are made of the love of God! Love received by one who only wants to hate and fight thwarts his deepest want and is therefore torture. If God could stop loving the damned, Hell would cease to be pure torture. If the sun could stop shining, lovers of the dark would no longer be tortured by it. But the sun could sooner cease to shine than God cease to be God...The lovelessness of the damned blinds them to the light of glory in which they stand, the glory of God’s fire. God is in the fire that to them is Hell. God is in Hell ('If I make my bed in Hell, Thou art there' [Ps 139:8]) but the damned do not know Him.
”
”
Peter Kreeft (Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven: But Never Dreamed of Asking)
“
It is our job as parents, to instill principles and values in our children. So that when they depart from you, those principles and values won’t depart from them. Mallory Bullard, a street soldier from the old school.
”
”
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
“
May there not be some subconscious jealousy that motivates our reactions to other people? Why do we eat chocolate sundaes when we know that we should reduce? Are we free from the influence of parental training? The Scriptures say, "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Parental training and all education proceed on the assumption that the will is not free, but can be trained, motivated, and directed. Finally, beyond both physiology and psychology there is God. Can we be sure that he is not directing our choices? Do we know that we are free from his grace? The Psalm says, "Blessed is the man whom you choose and cause to approach you." Is it certain that God has not caused us to choose to approach him? Can we set a limit to God's power? Can we tell how far it extends and just where it ends? Are we outside his control?
”
”
Gordon H. Clark (Religion, Reason, and Revelation)
“
But the heavy stroke which most of all distresses me is my dear Mother. I cannot overcome my too selfish sorrow, all her tenderness towards me, her care and anxiety for my welfare at all times, her watchfulness over my infant years, her advice and instruction in maturer age; all, all indear her memory to me, and highten my sorrow for her loss. At the same time I know a patient submission is my Duty. I will strive to obtain it! But the lenient hand of time alone can blunt the keen Edg of Sorrow. He who deignd to weep over a departed Friend, will surely forgive a sorrow which at all times desires to be bounded and restrained, by a firm Belief that a Being of infinite wisdom and unbounded Goodness, will carve out my portion in tender mercy towards me! Yea tho he slay me I will trust in him said holy Job. What tho his corrective Hand hath been streached against me; I will not murmer. Tho earthly comforts are taken away I will not repine, he who gave them has surely a right to limit their Duration, and has continued them to me much longer than deserved. I might have been striped of my children as many others have been. I might o! forbid it Heaven, I might have been left a solitary widow.
Still I have many blessing left, many comforts to be thankfull for, and rejoice in. I am not left to mourn as one without hope.
My dear parent knew in whom she had Believed...The violence of her disease soon weakned her so that she was unable to converse, but whenever she could speak, she testified her willingness to leave the world and an intire resignation to the Divine Will. She retaind her Senses to the last moment of her Existance, and departed the world with an easy tranquility, trusting in the merrits of a Redeamer," (p. 81 & 82).
”
”
Abigail Adams (My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams)
“
There are a hundred different ways to hold someone’s hand. There are the ways you hold a child’s hand, the ways you hold a friend’s hand, the ways you hold an elderly parent’s hand, the ways you hold the hands of the departing and of the dying and of the dead.
”
”
Philip Roth (American Pastoral (The American Trilogy, #1))
“
Miss Mason’s life was one long struggle against mechanism. She distrusted organisation and standardisation. For this reason, she would have no truck with government departments or municipal control. Again, she set little store by the results of public examinations.
”
”
Parents' National Educational Union (In Memoriam: A Tribute to Charlotte Mason)
“
And how easy it was to leave this life, after all - this life that could feel so present and permanent that departing from it must seem to require a tear into a different dimension. There the bunch of them were, young hopefuls, decorating their annually purged dorm rooms with postcards and prints and favorite photographs of friends, filling them with hot pots and dried flowers, throw rugs and stereos. Houseplants, a lamp, maybe some furniture brought up by encouraging parents. They nested there like miniature grownups. As if this provisional student life - with its brushfire friendships and drink-addled intimacies, its gorging on knowledge and blind sexual indulgences - could possibly last. As if it were a home, of any kind at all: someplace to gather one's sense of self. Flannery had never felt for a minute that these months of shared living took place on anything other than quicksand, and it had given this whole year (these scant seven or eight months, into which an aging decade or so had been condensed) a sliding, wavery feel. She came from earthquake country and knew the dangers of building on landfill. That was, it seemed to Flannery, the best description of this willed group project of freshman year: construction on landfill. A collective confusion of impressions and tendencies, mostly castoffs with a few keepers. What was there to count on in any of it? What structure would remain, founded on that?
”
”
Sylvia Brownrigg (Pages for You (Pages for You, #1))
“
They talk some more, Will prompting Peter into remembering their early childhood on the barge. How their parents always went that extra mile to make their infancy special, like the time they brought a freshly killed department store Santa Clause home for their midnight Christmas feast.
”
”
Matt Haig (The Radleys)
“
But in the parent department, he had won the lottery. So, he'd always known that when he finally told them, they'd make him feel like it was no big deal, like it didn't change a thing. They'd say they loved him just like he was, that there was no way they couldn't.
And that's exactly what they did.
”
”
John Corey Whaley (Highly Illogical Behavior)
“
It is so long before the mind can persuade itself that she, whom we saw every day, and whose existence appeared a part of our own, can have departed for ever - that the brightness of a beloved eye can be extinguished, and the sound of a voice so familiar, and dear to the ear, can be hushed, never more to be heard.
”
”
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein (Spanish Edition))
“
Nirlungayuk reached a similar conclusion. I tracked him down, seventeen years later, and asked him what the outcome of his country-foods campaign had been. “It didn’t really work,” he said, from his office in the Nunavut department of wildlife and environment. “Kids eat what parents make for them. That’s one thing I didn’t do is go to the parents.
”
”
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
Outside, on the other side of a black iron grill, was another crowd, just as anxious, just as sweaty and frightened. These were the parents and friends of those departing. They all waited for deliverance. When all the customs procedures had been completed, when the crowd of travelers had passed through the last security booths and were walking toward the tarmac, you could see, on the faces of those left behind, the relief, the joy, the pride of vicarious success. The vision of a happier future elsewhere, anywhere but here. Smiles of contentment, faces radiant with happiness. Nowhere else in the world does separation bear the hideous face of joy. This was a grotesque face, a deviation from all rules of human nature.
”
”
Dương Thu Hương (Paradise of the Blind)
“
The justification for leaving a marriage was that you were increasing the sum of happiness in the world. You were ending your own unhappiness, and your spouse’s (if you weren’t happy, your spouse couldn’t really be happy, either), and he or she would find real happiness elsewhere. The children had only known an unhappy marriage. Now they would learn what happy parents are like, and they would become happier, and able to create happy marriages themselves. But actually all this is false and self-serving. The only person whose happiness is increased is the departing spouse. There are no moral grounds for leaving a marriage. You are breaking your vow and causing pain to others. It is selfish, cruel, and dishonorable. How could he have lived with that?
”
”
Roxana Robinson (Leaving)
“
Here it is necessary briefly to consider the question of the cult of ancestors before venturing farther. The spirits of the departed are believed to be possessed of supernatural powers which they did not enjoy in the flesh. They may also be dissatisfied or malignant in consequence of being suddenly deprived of life, and if they are neglected by the living, are apt to be revengeful. Therefore they must be cajoled and propitiated. Fear of beings belonging to a mysterious state or sphere of which he knew nothing continually haunted and terrified primitive man and induced in him what is known as" the dread of the sacred." It was every man's personal duty to attend to the demands or requirements of his deceased ancestors. At first he would succour his own immediate forebears with food and gifts; but it must have been borne in upon him that when his parents joined the great majority, the care of the spirits of their parents likewise devolved upon him... and, by degrees, he might even come to regard himself as responsible for the well-being of a line of spirit ancestors of quite formidable genealogy. These, through his neglect, might starve in their tombs; or, alternatively, they might crave his company. Because of vengeance or loneliness they might send disease upon him, for the savage almost invariably believes illness to be brought about by the action of jealous or neglected ancestors. The loneliness of the spirit-world is the dead man's greatest excuse for desiring the company of his descendants.
”
”
Lewis Spence (British Fairy Origins)
“
Danielle Elizabeth Henderson! Get your ass over here!' she shouted. Grandma always used my full name when she was angry. None of the shoppers around her turned a head or lifted a finger to help; in the 1980s, department stores were full of people shouting the names of temporarily lost children, a cacophony of negligent parenting always ringing out like the last act of an opera.
”
”
Danielle Henderson (The Ugly Cry)
“
Because in the end, that's the only legacy anyone leaves behind: family. How you treated and loved your significant other bears a spiritual witness even after you've departed. And if you have children, how they are raised speaks an enduring volume about your moral backbone and beliefs. As do your closest friends and relatives. Charity also counts: To whom much is given, much is expected in return. I picked up that nugget from my parents.
”
”
Denis Leary (Why We Don't Suck)
“
I used to feel spiritually inferior because I had not experienced the more spectacular manifestations of the Spirit and could not point to any bona fide “miracles” in my life. Increasingly, though, I have come to see that what I value may differ greatly from what God values. Jesus, often reluctant to perform miracles, considered it progress when he departed earth and entrusted the mission to his flawed disciples. Like a proud parent, God seems to take more delight as a spectator of the bumbling achievements of stripling children than in any self-display of omnipotence.
From God’s perspective, if I may speculate, the great advance in human history may be what happened at Pentecost, which restored the direct correspondence of spirit to Spirit that had been lost in Eden. I want God to act in direct, impressive, irrefutable ways. God wants to “share power” with the likes of me, accomplishing his work through people, not despite them.
”
”
Philip Yancey (Reaching for the Invisible God)
“
For every boy here," he says, "I like to imagine that we're helping him go in a particular direction, a direction he is best suited for. For you, I've thought it might be the State Department, or something in that realm." Suddenly, in a thunderclap of revelation, I know that whatever I do with my life, it will not be "in that realm." So: despite everything teachers and parents say about how I'm free to choose, they have a plan for me after all. I cannot yet see that plan clearly, but I suddenly become wary.
”
”
Adam Hochschild (Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son)
“
Light-touch government works more efficiently in the presence of social capital. Police close more cases when citizens monitor neighborhood comings and goings. Child welfare departments do a better job of “family preservation” when neighbors and relatives provide social support to troubled parents. Public schools teach better when parents volunteer in classrooms and ensure that kids do their homework. When community involvement is lacking, the burdens on government employees—bureaucrats, social workers, teachers, and so forth—are that much greater and success that much more elusive.
”
”
Robert D. Putnam (Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community)
“
Outside the study hall the next fall, the fall of our senior year, the Nabisco plant baked sweet white bread twice a week. If I sharpened a pencil at the back of the room I could smell the baking bread and the cedar shavings from the pencil.... Pretty soon all twenty of us - our class - would be leaving. A core of my classmates had been together since kindergarten. I'd been there eight years. We twenty knew by bored heart the very weave of each other's socks....
The poems I loved were in French, or translated from the Chinese, Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek. I murmured their heartbreaking sylllables. I knew almost nothing of the diverse and energetic city I lived in. The poems whispered in my ear the password phrase, and I memorized it behind enemy lines: There is a world. There is another world.
I knew already that I would go to Hollins College in Virginia; our headmistress sent all her problems there, to her alma mater. "For the English department," she told me.... But, "To smooth off her rough edges," she had told my parents. They repeated the phrase to me, vividly.
I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it. Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?
”
”
Annie Dillard (An American Childhood)
“
A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques. “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.
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Charles Duhigg (Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business)
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1. INTENSITY: The loud, dramatic spirited children are the easiest to spot. They don’t cry; they shriek. They’re noisy when they play, when they laugh, and even when they take a shower, singing at the top of their lungs while the hot-water tank empties. But quiet, intently observant children may also be spirited. They assess each situation before entering it as though developing a strategy for every move; their intensity is focused inward rather than outward. No matter where their intensity is focused, the reactions of spirited children are always powerful. There is rarely a middle of the road. They never whimper; they wail. They can skip into a room, smiling and laughing only to depart thirty seconds later inflamed. Their tantrums are raw and enduring.
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Mary Sheedy Kurcinka (Raising Your Spirited Child: A Guide for Parents Whose Child is More Intense, Sensitive, Perceptive, Persistent, and Energetic)
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This should have stopped the schizophrenogenic voodoo right in its tracks. High blood pressure can be lessened with a drug that blocks a receptor for a different type of neurotransmitter, and you conclude that a core problem was too much of that neurotransmitter. But schizophrenic symptoms can be lessened with a drug that blocks dopamine receptors, and you still conclude that the core problem is toxic mothering. Remarkably, that’s what psychiatry’s psychoanalytic ruling class concluded. After fighting the introduction of the medications tooth and nail in America and eventually losing, they came up with an accommodation: neuroleptics weren’t doing anything to the core problems of schizophrenia; they just sedated patients enough so that it is easier to psychodynamically make progress with them about the scars from how they were mothered.
The psychoanalytic scumbags even developed a sneering, pejorative term for families (i.e., mothers) of schizophrenic patients who tried to dodge responsibility by believing that it was a brain disease: dissociative-organic types. The influential 1958 book
Social Class and Mental Illness: A Community Study
(John Wiley), by the Viennese psychiatrist Frederick Redlich, who chaired Yale’s psychiatry department for seventeen years, and the Yale sociologist August Hollingshead, explained it all. Dissociative-organic types were typically lower-class, less educated people, for whom “It’s a biochemical disorder” was akin to still believing in the evil eye, an easy, erroneous explanation for those not intelligent enough to understand Freud. Schizophrenia was still caused by lousy parenting, and nothing was to change in the mainstream for decades.
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Robert M. Sapolsky (Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will)
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With just about every script, in almost every corner of the set, I was faced with the truth: This was my parents' life. My mother had sat in handcuffs; my father had once worn an orange jumpsuit like the dozens that sat folded in our wardrobe department. For the other actors and me on our show, this was all fantasy, the re-creation of a world we knew little about; for Mami and Papi, it could not have been any more real or painful...I've had so many scenes in which Flaca & I are doing the dirty work, like cleaning the kitchen or mopping the floors, which is when I think of my parents most. Long before they ended up in prison, they'd spent years handling the nastiest jobs, the ones often avoided by others. Manual labor. Low pay. No respect. They must've felt so trapped. It must've been so hard for them to maintain their dignity when others looked down on them or, worse, didn't see them at all.
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Diane Guerrero (In the Country We Love: My Family Divided)
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This time he asks his audience to join him in a mental exercise. As Boyd states, Imagine that you are on a ski slope with other skiers [. . .]. Imagine that you are in Florida riding in an outboard motorboat, maybe even towing water-skiers. Imagine that you are riding a bicycle on a nice spring day. Imagine that you are a parent taking your son to a department store and that you notice he is fascinated by the toy tractors or tanks with rubber caterpillar treads’.38 Now imagine that you pull the ski’s off but you are still on the ski slope. Imagine also that you remove the outboard motor from the motor boat, and you are not longer in Florida. And from the bicycle you remove the handle- bar and discard the rest of the bike. Finally, you take off the rubber treads from the toy tractor or tanks. This leaves only the following separate pieces: skis, outboard motor, handlebars and rubber treads. However, he challenges his audience, what emerges when you pull all this together?39 SNOWMOBILE
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Frans P.B. Osinga (Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (Strategy and History))
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[Refers to 121 children taken into care in Cleveland due to suspected abuse (1987) and later returned to their parents]
Sue Richardson, the child abuse consultant at the heart of the crisis, watched as cases began to unravel:
“All the focus started to fall on the medical findings; other supportive evidence, mainly which we held in the social services department, started to be screened out. A situation developed where the cases either were proven or fell on the basis of medical evidence alone. Other evidence that was available to the court, very often then, never got put. We would have had statement from the child, the social workers and the child psychologist’s evidence from interviewing. We would have evidence of prior concerns, either from social workers or teachers, about the child’s behaviour or other symptoms that they might have been showing, which were completely aside from the medical findings. (Channel 4 1997)
Ten years after the Cleveland crisis, Sue Richardson was adamant that evidence relating to children’s safety was not presented to the courts which subsequently returned those children to their parents:
“I am saying that very clearly. In some cases, evidence was not put in the court. In other cases, agreements were made between lawyers not to put the case to the court at all, particularly as the crisis developed. Latterly, that children were sent home subject to informal agreements or agreements between lawyers. The cases never even got as far as the court. (Channel 4, 1997)”
Nor is Richardson alone. Jayne Wynne, one of the Leeds paediatricians who had pioneered the use of RAD as an indicator of sexual abuse and who subsequently had detailed knowledge of many of the Cleveland children, remains concerned by the haphazard approach of the courts to their protection.
I think the implication is that the children were left unprotected. The children who were being abused unfortunately returned to homes and the abuse may well have been ongoing. (Channel 4 1997)
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Heather Bacon (Creative Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: Challenges and Dilemmas)
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Anti-voting lawmakers perhaps weren’t intending to make it harder for married white women to vote, but that’s exactly what they did by requiring an exact name match across all forms of identification in many states in recent years. Birth certificates list people’s original surnames, but if they change their names upon marriage, their more recent forms of ID usually show their married names. Sandra Watts is a married white judge in the state of Texas who was forced to use a provisional ballot in 2013 under the state’s voter ID law. She was outraged at the imposition: “Why would I want to vote provisional ballot when I’ve been voting regular ballot for the last forty-nine years?” Like many women, she included her maiden name as her middle name when she took her husband’s last name—and that’s what her driver’s license showed. But on the voter rolls, her middle name was the one her parents gave her at birth, which she no longer used. And like that, she lost her vote—all because of a law intended to suppress people like Judge Watts’s fellow Texan Anthony Settles, a Black septuagenarian and retired engineer. Anthony Settles was in possession of his Social Security card, an expired Texas identification card, and his old University of Houston student ID, but he couldn’t get a new photo ID to vote in 2016 because his mother had changed his name when she remarried in 1964. Several lawyers tried to help him track down the name-change certificate in courthouses, to no avail; his only recourse was to go to court for a new one, at a cost of $250. Elderly, rural, and low-income voters are more likely not to have birth certificates or to have documents containing clerical errors. Hargie Randell, a legally blind Black Texan who couldn’t drive but who had a current voter registration card used before the new Texas law, had to arrange for people to drive him to the Department of Public Safety office three times, and once to the county clerk’s office an hour away, only to end up with a birth certificate that spelled his name wrong by one letter.
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Heather McGhee (The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together)
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READER’S REPORT From the Parent of a College Coed Dear Mother and Dad: Since I left for college I have been remiss in writing and I am sorry for my thoughtlessness in not having written before. I will bring you up to date now, but before you read on, please sit down. You are not to read any further unless you are sitting down, okay? Well, then, I am getting along pretty well now. The skull fracture and the concussion I got when I jumped out the window of my dormitory when it caught on fire shortly after my arrival here is pretty well healed now. I only spent two weeks in the hospital and now I can see almost normally and only get those sick headaches once a day. Fortunately, the fire in the dormitory, and my jump, was witnessed by an attendant at the gas station near the dorm, and he was the one who called the Fire Department and the ambulance. He also visited me in the hospital and since I had nowhere to live because of the burntout dormitory, he was kind enough to invite me to share his apartment with him. It’s really a basement room, but it’s kind of cute. He is a very fine boy and we have fallen deeply in love and are planning to get married. We haven’t got the exact date yet, but it will be before my pregnancy begins to show. Yes, Mother and Dad, I am pregnant. I know how much you are looking forward to being grandparents and I know you will welcome the baby and give it the same love and devotion and tender care you gave me when I was a child. The reason for the delay in our marriage is that my boyfriend has a minor infection which prevents us from passing our pre-marital blood tests and I carelessly caught it from him. Now that I have brought you up to date, I want to tell you that there was no dormitory fire, I did not have a concussion or skull fracture, I was not in the hospital, I am not pregnant, I am not engaged, I am not infected, and there is no boyfriend. However, I am getting a “D” in American History, and an “F” in Chemistry and I want you to see those marks in their proper perspective. Your loving daughter, Sharon Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she gets an “A” in psychology.
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Robert B. Cialdini (Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials))
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I discovered that the predominant effects produced by the drugs discussed in this book are positive. It didn’t matter whether the drug in question was cannabis, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, or psilocybin. Overwhelmingly, consumers expressed feeling more altruistic, empathetic, euphoric, focused, grateful, and tranquil. They also experienced enhanced social interactions, a greater sense of purpose and meaning, and increased sexual intimacy and performance. This constellation of findings challenged my original beliefs about drugs and their effects. I had been indoctrinated to be biased toward the negative effects of drug use. But over the past two-plus decades, I had gained a deeper, more nuanced understanding. Sure, negative effects were also possible outcomes. But they represented a minority of effects; they were predictable and readily mitigated. For example, the type of drug use described in this book should be limited to healthy, responsible adults. These individuals fulfill their responsibilities as citizens, parents, partners, and professionals. They eat healthy, exercise regularly, and get sufficient amounts of sleep. They take steps to alleviate chronic excessive stress levels. These practices ensure physical fitness and considerably reduce the likelihood of experiencing adverse effects. Equally important, I learned that people undergoing acute crises and those afflicted with psychiatric illnesses should probably avoid drug use because they may be at greater risk of experiencing unwanted effects. The vast amount of predictably favorable drug effects intrigued me, so much so that I expanded my own drug use to take advantage of the wide array of beneficial outcomes specific drugs can offer. To put this in personal terms, my position as department chairman (from 2016 to 2019) was far more detrimental to my health than my drug use ever was. Frequently, the demands of the job led to irregular exercise and poor eating and sleeping habits, which contributed to pathological stress levels. This wasn’t good for my mental or physical health. My drug use, however, has never been as disruptive or as problematic. It has, in fact, been largely protective against the negative health consequences of negotiating pathology-producing environments.
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Carl L. Hart (Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear)
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Maybe he can tell us where they took our things.”
Dropping into a squat, the herbalist placed two fingers against the youth’s jugular vein, feeling his pulse. Then she slapped his cheeks and peeled back his eyelids.
The novitiate remained slack and motionless.
His lack of response seemed to annoy the herbalist. “One moment,” she said, closing her eyes. A slight frown creased her brow. For a while, she was still; then she sprang upward with sudden speed. “What a self-absorbed little wretch! No wonder his parents sent him to join the priests. I’m surprised they put up with him as long as they did.”
“Does he know anything of use?” asked Eragon.
“Only the path to the surface.” She pointed toward the door to the left of the altar, the same door through which the priests had entered and departed. “It’s amazing that he tried to free you; I suspect it’s the first time in his life he’s ever done anything of his own accord.”
“We have to bring him with us.” Eragon hated to say it, but duty compelled him. “I promised we would if he helped us.”
“He tried to kill you!”
“I gave my word.”
Angela sighed and rolled her eyes. To Arya, she said, “I don’t suppose you can convince him otherwise?
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Christopher Paolini (Inheritance (The Inheritance Cycle, #4))
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His message delivered, Gabriel departed, leaving the chosen Virgin of Nazareth to ponder over her wondrous experience. Mary's promised Son was to be "The Only Begotten" of the Father in the flesh; so it had been both positively and abundantly predicted. True, the event was unprecedented; true also it has never been paralleled; but that the virgin birth would be unique was as truly essential to the fulfilment of prophecy as that it should occur at all. That Child to be born of Mary was begotten of Elohim, the Eternal Father, not in violation of natural law but in accordance with a higher manifestation thereof; and, the offspring from that association of supreme sanctity, celestial Sireship, and pure though mortal maternity, was of right to be called the "Son of the Highest." In His nature would be combined the powers of Godhood with the capacity and possibilities of mortality; and this through the ordinary operation of the fundamental law of heredity, declared of God, demonstrated by science, and admitted by philosophy, that living beings shall propagate—after their kind. The Child Jesus was to inherit the physical, mental, and spiritual traits, tendencies, and powers that characterized His parents—one immortal and glorified—God, the other human—woman.
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James E. Talmage (JESUS THE CHRIST [Illustrated])
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Being a good parent is hard. There's a lot of trial and error. In my case, quite a lot of the latter. ... And one thing you're never lacking once you become a parent is people criticizing you. Because children aren't just children these days, you know, you're identity markers. No one knows quite how that happened. Ten thousand year of sexual experience, and suddenly my generation decides that we're going to carry you out of the maternity ward as though you were the Champions League Cup. As though we were the first people in the history of the world who figured out how reproduction works. We don't even need to be 'good' parents any more, I think. That's passed now. We make do with 'not horible' by this point. ... And of the few ways we can convince ourselves that we're actually decent as parents is by making other people seem like bad parents. And we can be pretty damn creative when it comes down to it. If it isn't the food or the toys or the fact that the child sometimes has to stay at nursery until quarter past three in the afternoon then it's the non-organic plastic in whatever the hell piece of furniture that hasn't been given some certificate by some department in Brussels. 'Oh? YOu let your child play with THAT? Ah, well, me personally, I would rather my child didn't get brain cancer ... but it's nice that everyone can raise their children in their own way, isn't it?' That's how we bring each other down.
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Fredrik Backman (Things My Son Needs to Know about the World)
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In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.
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Stephanie Foo (What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma)
“
As the conference continued it occurred to me finally that it wasn't really about Indian history as it was written, but really about rewriting it by taking a fresh look at race, ethnicity, gender, and a mix of sociocultural questions...
I just couldn't believe how far along the desi scene was, not just socially but intellectually, how many people were out there thinking about it. This whole event so far rocked my world, muddled me still more, and delivered a series of tiny epiphanies, all at the same time. To be honest, I was quite intimidated by the dialogue going on, as well as by the passion and conviction of these people on so many subjects which I, frankly, had never really even thought about.
...A history of a people in transit -- what could that be card catalogued under? And the history of the ABCD. Everyone seemed to know about this ABCD thing -- that didn't seem very confused to me! And it was a relatively new phenomenon; it had never occurred to me that things going on now could have a history already. The moments that made up my life in the present tense seemed so fleetingly urgent and self-contained to me: I'd always felt my life had very little to do with my parents' and especially their parents' histories...and that it would have very little effect on anything to come.
But the way these people were talking -- about desis in Hollywood; South Asian Studies departments; the relatively new Asian Indian slot on the census -- was hummingly sculpting the air, as if they were making history as they spoke. Making it, messily but surely, even simply by speaking. I was feeling it, too -- a sense of history in the making. But where did I fit in to any of it?
And how come no one had told me?
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Tanuja Desai Hidier (Born Confused (Born Confused #1))
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THE OBEDIENCE GAME DUGGAR KIDS GROW UP playing the Obedience Game. It’s sort of like Mother May I? except it has a few extra twists—and there’s no need to double-check with “Mother” because she (or Dad) is the one giving the orders. It’s one way Mom and Dad help the little kids in the family burn off extra energy some nights before we all put on our pajamas and gather for Bible time (more about that in chapter 8). To play the Obedience Game, the little kids all gather in the living room. After listening carefully to Mom’s or Dad’s instructions, they respond with “Yes, ma’am, I’d be happy to!” then run and quickly accomplish the tasks. For example, Mom might say, “Jennifer, go upstairs to the girls’ room, touch the foot of your bed, then come back downstairs and give Mom a high-five.” Jennifer answers with an energetic “Yes, ma’am, I’d be happy to!” and off she goes. Dad might say, “Johannah, run around the kitchen table three times, then touch the front doorknob and come back.” As Johannah stands up she says, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to!” “Jackson, go touch the front door, then touch the back door, then touch the side door, and then come back.” Jackson, who loves to play army, stands at attention, then salutes and replies, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to!” as he goes to complete his assignment at lightning speed. Sometimes spotters are sent along with the game player to make sure the directions are followed exactly. And of course, the faster the orders can be followed, the more applause the contestant gets when he or she slides back into the living room, out of breath and pleased with himself or herself for having complied flawlessly. All the younger Duggar kids love to play this game; it’s a way to make practicing obedience fun! THE FOUR POINTS OF OBEDIENCE THE GAME’S RULES (MADE up by our family) stem from our study of the four points of obedience, which Mom taught us when we were young. As a matter of fact, as we are writing this book she is currently teaching these points to our youngest siblings. Obedience must be: 1. Instant. We answer with an immediate, prompt “Yes ma’am!” or “Yes sir!” as we set out to obey. (This response is important to let the authority know you heard what he or she asked you to do and that you are going to get it done as soon as possible.) Delayed obedience is really disobedience. 2. Cheerful. No grumbling or complaining. Instead, we respond with a cheerful “I’d be happy to!” 3. Thorough. We do our best, complete the task as explained, and leave nothing out. No lazy shortcuts! 4. Unconditional. No excuses. No, “That’s not my job!” or “Can’t someone else do it? or “But . . .” THE HIDDEN GOAL WITH this fun, fast-paced game is that kids won’t need to be told more than once to do something. Mom would explain the deeper reason behind why she and Daddy desired for us to learn obedience. “Mom and Daddy won’t always be with you, but God will,” she says. “As we teach you to hear and obey our voice now, our prayer is that ultimately you will learn to hear and obey what God’s tells you to do through His Word.” In many families it seems that many of the goals of child training have been lost. Parents often expect their children to know what they should say and do, and then they’re shocked and react harshly when their sweet little two-year-old throws a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store. This parental attitude probably stems from the belief that we are all born basically good deep down inside, but the truth is, we are all born with a sin nature. Think about it: You don’t have to teach a child to hit, scream, whine, disobey, or be selfish. It comes naturally. The Bible says that parents are to “train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
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Jill Duggar (Growing Up Duggar: It's All about Relationships)
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From the beginning, the gospel message has had a profound eschatological component. The compelling challenge for every person is the inevitability of the ultimate catastrophe of death. It haunts us particularly as we age and realize as parents die and out peers depart that we are, in some sense, “next.” Man was not created to die. God placed eternity in his heart and an immortal spirit that cannot comprehend the end of life. Fear of our mortality lurks in the background of our lives, dampening our joys, and in sober moments, bringing us to an awareness of our overwhelming fragility. Much of modern life is an attempt to live as though we will be here forever. It is a fantasy of denial, supported by the pleasures of the moment, which collectively serve as a narcotic, dulling the awareness of death’s certainty and near proximity.
The message of the gospel is the message of life for us, a life out of death, provided in the person of our substitute, Jesus Christ. As the only one qualified to face the foe, He took all that death could give – energized by Satan’s rage – and came out the victor, providing immortality to all who would believe in Him. His victory was not simply the means of our return to Eden’s joys, with their attendant vulnerability to the possibility of yet another fall. It closed the door forever to another intrusion of sin and death by giving perfect, sinless immortality to those who are His own. He gave them the absolute promise of eternal perfection, the ultimate cure for our desperate condition. The immeasurable value of this offer is set against the absolute terror of hell, the almost unimaginable reality that death is not simply ceasing to exist of blending into the infinite, it is the conscious experience of the most horrible suffering forever. To think for any length of time on this possibility and the utter hopelessness of those whose end it is will bring one to insanity.
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John E. Hartman
“
The traditional hospital practice of excluding parents ignored the importance of attachment relationships as regulators of the child’s emotions, behaviour and physiology. The child’s biological status would be vastly different under the circumstances of parental presence or absence. Her neurochemical output, the electrical activity in her brain’s emotional centres, her heart rate, blood pressure and the serum levels of the various hormones related to stress would all vary significantly. Life is possible only within certain well-defined limits, internal or external.
We can no more survive, say, high sugar levels in our bloodstream than we can withstand high levels of radiation emanating from a nuclear explosion. The role of self-regulation, whether emotional or physical, may be likened to that of a thermostat ensuring that the temperature in a home remains constant despite the extremes of weather conditions outside. When the environment becomes too cold, the heating system is switched on. If the air becomes overheated, the air conditioner begins to work.
In the animal kingdom, self-regulation is illustrated by the capacity of the warm-blooded creature to exist in a broad range of environments. It can survive more extreme variations of hot and cold without either chilling or overheating than can a coldblooded species. The latter is restricted to a much narrower range of habitats because it does not have the capacity to self-regulate the internal environment. Children and infant animals have virtually no capacity for biological self-regulation; their internal biological states—heart rates, hormone levels, nervous system activity — depend completely on their relationships with caregiving grown-ups.
Emotions such as love, fear or anger serve the needs of protecting the self while maintaining essential relationships with parents and other caregivers. Psychological stress is whatever threatens the young creature’s perception of a safe relationship with the adults, because any disruption in the relationship will cause turbulence in the internal milieu. Emotional and social relationships remain important biological influences beyond childhood. “Independent self-regulation may not exist even in adulthood,” Dr. Myron Hofer, then of the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, wrote in 1984. “Social interactions may continue to play an important role in the everyday regulation of internal biologic systems throughout life.” Our biological response to environmental challenge is profoundly influenced by the context and by the set of relationships that connect us with other human beings. As one prominent researcher has expressed it most aptly, “Adaptation does not occur wholly within the individual.”
Human beings as a species did not evolve as solitary creatures but as social animals whose survival was contingent on powerful emotional connections with family and tribe. Social and emotional connections are an integral part of our neurological and chemical makeup. We all know this from the daily experience of dramatic physiological shifts in our bodies as we interact with others. “You’ve burnt the toast again,” evokes markedly different bodily responses from us, depending on whether it is shouted in anger or said with a smile. When one considers our evolutionary history and the scientific evidence at hand, it is absurd even to imagine that health and disease could ever be understood in isolation from our psychoemotional networks. “The basic premise is that, like other social animals, human physiologic homeostasis and ultimate health status are influenced not only by the physical environment but also by the social environment.” From such a biopsychosocial perspective, individual biology, psychological functioning and interpersonal and social relationships work together, each influencing the other.
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Gabor Maté (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress)
“
Like most parents we had some kind of issue with each of our children. Two of them struggled getting through school, one was very messy, and another was an extreme perfectionist and put tremendous pressure on herself. The good news is they all made it and are doing fine. Some of them took a little detour and made some bad choices, but they learned from them and came full circle back to what they were taught. God’s Word states that if we train them in the way they should go, when they are old they will not depart from it (see Proverbs 22:6). If you are concerned about one of your children, just cling to that promise I just mentioned.
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Joyce Meyer (100 Ways to Simplify Your Life)
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What is your opinion of Lady Helen?" he asked as Quincy arranged the meal on the table in front of him.
"She is the jewel of the Ravenels," Quincy said. "A more kind-hearted girl you'll ever meet. Sadly, she's always been overlooked. Her older brother received the lion's share of her parents' interest, and what little was left went to the twins."
Rhys had met the twins a few days earlier, both of them bright-eyed and amusing, asking a score of questions about his department store. He had liked the girls well enough, but neither of them had captured his interest. They were nothing close to Helen, whose reserve was mysterious and alluring. She was like a mother-of-pearl shell that appeared to be one color, but from different angles revealed delicate shimmers of lavender, pink, blue, green. A beautiful exterior that revealed little of its true nature.
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Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
On the night of February, 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin was enjoying the fruits of a similar policy. Instead of being back in Miami in a juvenile detention facility, he was wandering through the streets of Sanford, high and angry. On two occasions in the previous few months, school police had detained him for what should have been crimes, once for drugs and another time for possession of stolen female jewelry and a burglary tool. The police fudged his record in both cases to help the department lower arrest statistics for young black men.14 Trayvon’s high school did not even tell his parents the real reason their son had been suspended from school. The parents thought it was everyday mischief, and they left him pretty much to his own devices.
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”
Jesse Lee Peterson (The Antidote: Healing America From the Poison of Hate, Blame, and Victimhood)
“
The well-known proverb “Train up a child in the way that he should go; even when he is old, he will not depart from it” does not promise that Christian parenting will produce Christian children. Rather, it states the general, wise principle that a godly parent must train her children in the way of godliness.
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Jen Wilkin (Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds)
“
Were you not optimistic about Mr. Winterborn’s vision?”
“I expected it would turn out well enough, but there was still a chance that something might have gone wrong. I would hate for that to happen to Winterborne. He’s not one to suffer hard knocks with forbearance and grace.”
Helen gathered that not all of Winterborne’s impatience was a result of being confined to a sickroom. “I had imagined that a man who owned a department store would be very charming and put people at ease.”
West grinned at that. “He can be. But the moments when he’s charming and putting people at ease are when he’s most dangerous. Never trust him when he’s nice.”
Her eyes rounded with surprise. “I thought he was your friend.”
“Oh, he is. But have no illusions about Winterborne. He’s not like any man you’ve ever known, nor is he someone your parents would have allowed you to meet in society.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
Were you not optimistic about Mr. Winterborn’s vision?”
“I expected it would turn out well enough, but there was still a chance that something might have gone wrong. I would hate for that to happen to Winterborne. He’s not one to suffer hard knocks with forbearance and grace.”
Helen gathered that not all of Winterborne’s impatience was a result of being confined to a sickroom. “I had imagined that a man who owned a department store would be very charming and put people at ease.”
West grinned at that. “He can be. But the moments when he’s charming and putting people at ease are when he’s most dangerous. Never trust him when he’s nice.”
Her eyes rounded with surprise. “I thought he was your friend.”
“Oh, he is. But have no illusions about Winterborne. He’s not like any man you’ve ever known, nor is he someone your parents would have allowed you to meet in society.”
“My parents,” Helen said, “had no intention of allowing me to meet anyone in society.”
Staring at her keenly, West asked, “Why is that, I wonder?”
She was silent, regretting her comment.
“I’ve always thought it odd,” West remarked, “that you’ve been obliged to live like a nun in a cloister. Why didn’t your brother take you to London for the season when he was courting Kathleen?”
She met his gaze directly. “Town held no interest for me; I was happier staying here.”
West’s hand slid over hers and squeezed briefly. “Little friend…let me give you some advice that may prove helpful in the future, when you’re in society. When you lie, don’t fidget with your hands. Keep them still and relaxed in your lap.”
“I wasn’t--” Helen broke off abruptly. After a slow breath, she spoke calmly. “I wanted to go, but Theo didn’t think I was ready.”
“Better.” He grinned at her. “Still a lie…but better.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Cold-Hearted Rake (The Ravenels, #1))
“
I
For Marcel Proust. - The son of well-to-do parents who, whether from talent or weakness, engages in a so-called intellectual profession,
as an artist or a scholar, will have a particularly difficult time with those bearing the distasteful title of colleagues. It is not merely that his independence is envied, the seriousness of his intentions mistrusted, and that he is suspected of being a secret envoy of the establishE:d powers. Such suspicions, though betraying a deepseated resentment, would usually prove well-founded. But the real resistances lie elsewhere. The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become 'practical', a business with strict division of labour, departments and restricted entry. The man of independent means who chooses it out of repugnance for the ignominy of earning money will not be disposed to acknowledge the fact. For this he is punished. He is not a 'professional', is ranked in the competitive hierarchy as a dilettante no matter how well he knows his subject, and must, if he wants to make a career, show himself even more resolutely blinkered than the most inveterate specialist. The urge to suspend the division of labour which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies. The departmentalization of mind is a means of abolishing mind where it is not exercised ex officio, under contract. It performs this task all the more reliably since anyone who repudiates the division of labour - if only by taking pleasure in his work - makes himself vulnerable by its standards in ways inseparable from elements of his superiority. Thus is order ensured: some have to play the game because they cannot otherwise live, and those who could live otherwise are kept out because they do not want to play the game. It is as if the class from which independent intellectuals have defected takes its revenge, by pressing its demands home in the very domain where the deserter seeks refuge.
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Adorno
“
Missionary kids are called. But they are called to God Himself. After that, it’s anyone’s guess. After that it could be to a small town in England, a large city in North America, a tenured professorship at a university, a foreign service position with the state department. Rarely does our call look the same as that of our parents. Our journey often begins through the faith and calling of our parents, rooted in the past but grown and sustained through our own decisions of faith.
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Marilyn R. Gardner (Between Worlds: Essays on Culture and Belonging)
“
Parents have the obligation to instruct their children. “Raise up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6).
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Ginny Seuffert (It Doesn't Have to Be This Way)
“
In April 2012, The New York Times published a heart-wrenching essay by Claire Needell Hollander, a middle school English teacher in the New York City public schools. Under the headline “Teach the Books, Touch the Heart,” she began with an anecdote about teaching John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. As her class read the end together out loud in class, her “toughest boy,” she wrote, “wept a little, and so did I.” A girl in the class edged out of her chair to get a closer look and asked Hollander if she was crying. “I am,” she said, “and the funny thing is I’ve read it many times.” Hollander, a reading enrichment teacher, shaped her lessons around robust literature—her classes met in small groups and talked informally about what they had read. Her students did not “read from the expected perspective,” as she described it. They concluded (not unreasonably) that Holden Caulfield “was a punk, unfairly dismissive of parents who had given him every advantage.” One student read Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies as raps. Another, having been inspired by Of Mice and Men, went on to read The Grapes of Wrath on his own and told Hollander how amazed he was that “all these people hate each other, and they’re all white.” She knew that these classes were enhancing her students’ reading levels, their understanding of the world, their souls. But she had to stop offering them to all but her highest-achieving eighth-graders. Everyone else had to take instruction specifically targeted to boost their standardized test scores. Hollander felt she had no choice. Reading scores on standardized tests in her school had gone up in the years she maintained her reading group, but not consistently enough. “Until recently, given the students’ enthusiasm for the reading groups, I was able to play down that data,” she wrote. “But last year, for the first time since I can remember, our test scores declined in relation to comparable schools in the city. Because I play a leadership role in the English department, I felt increased pressure to bring this year’s scores up. All the teachers are increasing their number of test-preparation sessions and practice tests, so I have done the same, cutting two of my three classic book groups and replacing them with a test preparation tutorial program.” Instead of Steinbeck and Shakespeare, her students read “watered-down news articles or biographies, bastardized novels, memos or brochures.” They studied vocabulary words, drilled on how to write sentences, and practiced taking multiple-choice tests. The overall impact of such instruction, Hollander said, is to “bleed our English classes dry.” So
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Michael Sokolove (Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater)
“
In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international “War on Drugs” is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a dangerous no-win situation. If the goal of the War on Drugs is to discourage or prevent drug use, it has failed. Among young people in North America drug use has reached unprecedented levels and enjoys unprecedented tolerance. According to figures quoted by Norm Stamper, the number of Americans who have used illegal drugs stands at 77 million.
The U.S. Department of Justice reports that the number of prisoners has tripled, from 139 per 100,000 residents in 1980 to 476 per 100,000 in 2002, the vast majority being incarcerated after drug convictions. From 1980 to 1999 the annual number of Americans arrested for drug offences nearly tripled, from 580,900 to 1,532,200. “That’s a lot of enemies,” comments the ex–police chief. If the War’s purpose is to protect people and communities or to improve their quality of life, it fails disastrously.
As the personal histories of Downtown Eastside addicts illustrate and as statistics show, the human costs are devastating. “One [result] which is especially cruel and will have a terrible impact on American life for many generations is the large increase in the number of women incarcerated for drug violations,” U.S. District Court Judge John T. Curtin has pointed out.
From 1980 to 1996, there has been a 400 percent increase in the number of women prisoners. Many of those jailed for drug violations were mules or assistants. I venture that none was a principal organizer. Many are the mothers of small children who will be left without maternal care, and most probably without any parental care at all…The engine of punitive punishment of mothers will haunt this nation for many years to come.
If the War’s aim is to end or even curtail the international drug trade, it has failed there, too. If it is to suppress the cultivation of plants from which the major substances of abuse are derived: once again, abject failure. Truth, once again, is among the inevitable casualties of war.
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Gabor Maté (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction)
“
Everything Maman and I have done for the last two decades has been for you and your brother! His Latin tutor. Your English lessons. And that trousseau. Maman has nearly gone blind embroidering. By the time you marry, you’ll have enough goods to fill a department store.”
“But I never asked for anything.”
“You’ve never had to.”
The realization hit me like a nightstick. My entire life, I’d been proud. I’d never hesitated to rebel against Papa and to think for myself. I’d seen what happened to Aunt Caro, and I worked hard for my own independence. Now, with unsettling clarity, I understood that though I’d never asked for anything, I’d never needed to—my parents had laid clothes, opportunities, and even suitors in front of me like a red carpet. I felt stunned. Paul wasn’t who I thought he was. Papa wasn’t
who I thought he was. I wasn’t who I thought I was.
”
”
Janet Skeslien Charles (The Paris Library)
“
Children were forced to translate English to their parents. Their parents had no one to help them understand English. Bosnian children also drove parents to places like work, stores, doctor’s appointments, etc. because of their physical handicaps. Due to a lack of understanding English, their parents could not get a driver’s license. Imagine barely escaping a genocide, going to a foreign country, leaving everything you own behind, having memories of war and murdered family members, your identity practically destroyed, and then having to figure out where grocery stores, department stores, and malls are in an alien culture. Essentially, they did not have resources and access to information that was trivially available to other people around them.
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Aida Mandic (Justice For Bosnia and Herzegovina)
“
On a street around the corner from my coauthor’s house the parents have organized themselves into what they call “the little block that can.” Social relations are deliberately cultivated among the families living on this block. There are benches and picnic tables outside several of the homes where parents and kids of all ages gather. The children have learned to relate to all the adults on this street as attachment figures, surrogate aunts and uncles. Once a year the street is shut off to traffic for what, in effect, is a village festival. There are games, food is served, music is played from loudspeakers. The local fire department drives up with a red engine and children frolic in the spray of the fire hose.
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Gordon Neufeld (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
“
My parents asked to meet me in a department store so they could purchase me a shirt that would disguise all my nonconformism. I loathe wearing plain suits and shirts – they feel like heterosexual prisons, the ties like death-penalty nooses. I often feel such an aversion to them that I can develop a rash around my neck. But I had learnt to just grin and bear it. So I agreed to wear the straitjacket, and dress up as the heterosexual son they all needed me to be.
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Amrou Al-Kadhi (Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between)
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A PRAYER FOR OUR CHILDREN
‘Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him(Psalm 127:3, NLT). Dear Lord Jesus, we come before you with our hearts full of thanks giving for all the precious children on the planet earth in the mighty name of Jesus. Father God help us to be always available for them physically and spiritually, in Jesus name. We ask you Lord to help us to be the faithful and to be the doting parents to our children and help us to put them in your righteous and loving hands. Help us to train our children in the way they should go, even when they are old they will not depart from it(Provers 22:6).
Heavenly Father uproot the spirit of fear and fill their hearts and minds with hope, love, peace, strength and courage to deal with every situation they are facing in the mighty name of Jesus. Father God we ask you to help them not to compromise who they are for the sake of fitting in. Help them to know you, to believe in you and to understand your loving nature and know that they are fearfully and wonderfully made in your likeness and they are loved by you.
Lord we ask for your divine protection wherever they go and help them to follow your lead wherever they go.
Father God, help us to teach our children to be blessings to those who are in need. Help them to know and understand the value of humanity, help them to be kind towards all humanity and help them to walk in the spirit of humility in the mighty name of Jesus. We ask you Lord to help them to choose good friends, help them make right decisions in life and help them not to freak out when they make mistakes in Jesus name.
We put our trust in you King of kings and we know that there is nothing impossible with you and we ask you to rule and reign in our children lives throughout their life stages and let the drops of your mercy melt and shine on them in the mighty name of Jesus. We thank you for your faithfulness and unconditional love. We bless your holy name and we thank you for your promises, your promises are YES AND AMEN. In the mighty name of Jesus amen.
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Euginia Herlihy
“
Enroll in the Best Hebrew School Atlanta for a Rich Cultural Experience
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They encourage family involvement and provide opportunities for families to participate in their children's educational path. They think that fostering a compassionate and supportive atmosphere that promotes holistic growth requires a strong relationship between parents, educators, and students. Enrolling your child in the top Hebrew School in Atlanta means laying the groundwork for a lifetime of Jewish involvement, cultural awareness, and personal development. Join us on this extraordinary trip as we arouse curiosity, create a love of Hebrew, and foster a deep appreciation for Jewish School education. Let us work together to produce a wonderful cultural experience. Contact the head of the department at The Epstein School.
”
”
epsteinatlanta
“
I’m going to tell you a really important lesson I learned after Emily died. I thought I knew what it was to be part of a team. I was in the army, joined Delta, I trusted my team with everything, and knew they had my back no matter what. Then I lost my wife and was the sole parent to a newborn. Lolly was my responsibility, and I took that seriously. I tried to juggle everything myself. Funeral arrangements, caring for Lolly, taking care of the house, laundry, cleaning, grocery shopping, midnight feeds, and a colicky baby. I thought I had to do it all and didn’t want to accept help from anyone. You know what eventually happened?” “What?” “I crashed. Two months after Lolly was born, I was cooking dinner, lay down for just a moment, and woke up an hour later to someone hammering on my apartment door. Dinner burned which set off the smoke detectors, the fire department came, and I realized that raising my daughter wasn’t a mission I could undertake without my team. I needed my parents, needed Bear and the rest of Alpha team, needed Prey and the Oswalds. So, I reached out for help.
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Jane Blythe (Lethal Risk (Prey Security: Alpha Team, #2))
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But the reproach was short-lived, and was almost immediately replaced with a conspiratorial look—such a look of understanding and delight as might cross a parental face when the parent discovers her child has done something immensely distinguished and has been too modest to boast about it. So might a parent look on finding out that her daughter has been chosen for a university ski team, when she thought all along that she was only a moderately competent skier; or if she discovered that her daughter was in the running for a “Young Woman of the Year” award and had said nothing about it; or when, as in this case, she found out that her daughter had at last managed to find a nice-looking boyfriend with no visible tattoos or facial piercings.
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Alexander McCall Smith (The Department of Sensitive Crimes (Detective Varg #1))
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But the boy Jesus seeing what he had done, became angry, and said to him, Thou fool, what harm did the lake do thee, that thou shouldest scatter the water? 3 Behold, now thou shalt wither as a tree, and shalt not bring forth either leaves, or branches, or fruit. 4 And immediately he became withered all over. 5 Then Jesus went away home. But the parents of the boy who was withered, lamenting the misfortune of his youth, took and carried him to Joseph, accusing him, and said, Why dost thou keep a son who is guilty of such actions? 6 Then Jesus at the request of all who were present did heal him, leaving only some small member to continue withered, that they might take warning. 7 Another time Jesus went forth into the street, and a boy running by, rushed upon his shoulder; 8 At which Jesus being angry, said to him, Thou shalt go no farther; 9 And he instantly fell down dead: 10 Which when some persons saw, they said, Where was this boy born, that every thing which he says presently cometh to pass? 11 Then the parents of the dead boy going to Joseph, complained, saying, You are not fit to live with us, in our city, having such a boy as that: 12 Either teach him that he bless and not curse, or else depart hence with him, for he kills our children.
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John Volz (Buried Books of the Bible)
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Proverbs 22:6 (KJV) Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
..and pray for the Holy Ghost for them.
You have 12 whole years to do all that. After that let them alone and trust God and believe in the prayers.
Stop being their Holy Ghost! Be a parent and a friend. If you can't love them as your children love them as sinners to win to Christ.
Don't run them out of the presence of God with that attitude
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Mary Tornyenyor
“
El Indio’s gang pulled in over thirty-one million tax-free dollars in under three years.” Taylor writes, “Everybody along the chain was paid: the customs agent, the police, the American police departments that sold the bikes, the truck drivers, bike mechanics, recruiters, checadors, comunicadors, ganchos, guias, and levantons...a child whose parents left him with an elderly grandfather in an impoverished village, who attended school part-time to the seventh grade, came to the border, lost everything dear to him, and became a millionaire...then he vanished.
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Kimball Taylor (The Coyote's Bicycle: The Untold Story of 7,000 Bicycles and the Rise of a Borderland Empire)
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late 2011, the U.S. Department of Education made a historic change to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act to allow schools to release student records to third-party organizations without parental consent.
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Glenn Beck (Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education (The Control Series Book 2))
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Our child has Down Syndrome. USHA claims that we violated several health care laws, so now they are going to take him away at the end of the month. I’m wondering if the FBI can do anything,” “I’m sorry to hear that. No, the FBI can’t do anything, but I wish we could. When I worked for the Douglas County Sheriff’s department, we were called out a lot when parents objected to the heavy-handedness of USHA. USHA always won the argument. Once they were given power, they kept taking more and more, so now they’re practically as powerful as DOJ. I don’t think Congress realized what they were creating back in the 2010’s. Anyway, you must be wondering what I called you in here for.
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Cliff Ball (Times of Trouble: Christian End Times Novel (The End Times Saga Book 2))
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Don’t be ridiculous, Charlie, people love the parents who beat their kids in department stores. It’s the ones who just let their kids wreak havoc that everybody hates.
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Christopher Moore (A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper, #1))
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for behold, I know that if ye are brought up in the way ye should go ye will not depart from it. 6 Wherefore, if ye are cursed, behold, I leave my blessing upon you, that the cursing may be taken from you and be answered upon the heads of your parents.
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Joseph Smith Jr. (The Illustrated LDS Scriptures)
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Everyone knew Sonja was destined for great things, but no one knew what to do with her until then. Even in academia, her natural habitat, she was an exotic species. Though her Russianness gave her certain dispensations, the idea that a young woman of any ethnicity could so excel in the hard sciences was a far-fetched fantasy. Their parents encouraged her at a distance. Neither understood the molecular formulas, electromagnetic fields, or anatomical minutiae that so captivated her, and so their support came by way of well-intentioned, inadequate generalities. Even after Sonja graduated secondary school at the top of her class and matriculated to the city university biology department, their parents found more to love in Natasha. Sonja’s gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable. Natasha was beautiful and charming. They didn’t need MDs to know how to be proud of her.
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Anthony Marra (A Constellation of Vital Phenomena)
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if these were native Haldanians, you’d help them.” “Of course. Their parents could foot the bill. The Conversion Department is very strict with funding.
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Tam Linsey (Botanicaust (Botanicaust #1))
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Courtship
Anyway, next day I went to Windsor and I arrived about 5 o’clock and he sat me down and said: ‘I’ve missed you so much.’ But there was never anything tactile about him. It was extraordinary, but I didn’t have anything to go by because I had never had a boyfriend. I’d always kept them away, thought they were all trouble--and I couldn’t handle it emotionally, I was very screwed up, I thought. Anyway, so he said ‘Will you marry me?’ and I laughed. I remember thinking, ‘This is a joke,’ and I said: ‘Yeah, OK,’ and laughed. He was deadly serious. He said: ‘You do realize that one day you will be Queen.’ And a voice said to me inside: ‘You won’t be Queen but you’ll have a tough role.’ So I thought ‘OK,’ so I said: ‘Yes.’ I said: ‘I love you so much, I love you so much.’ He said: ‘Whatever love means.’ He said it then. So I thought that was great! I thought he meant that! And so he ran upstairs and rang his mother.
In my immaturity, which was enormous, I thought that he was very much in love with me, which he was, but he always had a sort of besotted look about him, looking back at it, but it wasn’t the genuine sort. ‘Who was this girl who was so different?’ but he couldn’t understand it because his immaturity was quite big in that department too. For me it was like a call of duty, really--to go and work with the people.
I came back to the flat and sat on my bed. ‘Guess what?’ They said: ‘He asked you. What did you say?’ ‘Yes, please.’ Everybody screamed and howled and we went for a drive around London with our secret. I rang my parents the next morning. Daddy was thrilled. ‘How wonderful.’ Mummy was thrilled. I told my brother and he said ‘Who to?
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Andrew Morton (Diana: Her True Story in Her Own Words)
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In February 1914, the Pierstorffs of Grangeville, Idaho, sent their five-year-old daughter to visit her grandmother 75 miles away in Lewiston via parcel post, because it was cheaper than buying her a train ticket. Little May Pierstorff weighed 48 pounds, which meant that she was just under the Post Office Department’s 50-pound limit for parcels. The Grangeville postmaster charged her parents 53 cents, attaching the appropriate stamps to the front of her coat. May traveled all the way to Lewiston in a railway baggage car under the watchful eye of a railway mail clerk. When she arrived, a mail clerk on duty drove her to her grandmother’s house rather than leaving her at the post office for morning delivery. Soon there were more incidents of “child mailing,” and finally the Post Office Department outlawed the practice.
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Devin Leonard (Neither Snow nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service)
“
Mid June 2012 …Continuing Bernard’s story, the adolescent did not adjust well to his first foster home. I spend time with him whenever I could. The poor boy was bullied relentlessly in school and I feared that the bullies, like KiWi and his gang of 3 would eventually drive the boy to suicidal attempts. One day when we met he was crying uncontrollably. After inviting him to have high tea with me at my hostel, he finally confided his secret. Besides suffering the wrath of his father’s drunken beatings; his older brother Jack was as much a tyrant like the old man. Jack had raped the adolescent when he refused his brother’s advances. Bernard was afraid to tell the Reverend in case the minister confronts the brother and he was petrified that his older sibling would come for revenge. By now Bernard was shaking uncontrollably. I had to embrace the boy to calm his distress. It was my duty to report this violent act to Pastor Rick which I did. The Reverend like me was astonished that there was so much abuse in the dysfunctional McGee household. Besides being afraid of his brother and father, Bernard was also bullied by an older boy in his foster home. Nick was taking advantage of the meek and genteel Bernard, ordering him around when his parents were not in the house. My heart reached out to my friend. I offered to assist him anyway I could. He ended up staying with me at the hostel for two months before I departed for London. By then, the Pastor had found the boy a stable family where he was well taken care of.
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Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
“
I am sorry, Anna. I’ve talked about losing two brothers, both during my adulthood, and I never considered that you have losses of your own.” He did not raise the issue of the departed Mr. Seaton, for which Anna was profoundly grateful. “It was a long time ago,” Anna said. “My parents did not suffer. Their carriage careened down a muddy embankment, and their necks were broken. The poor horse, by contrast, had to wait hours to be shot.” “Dear God.” The earl shuddered. “Were you in that carriage, as well?” “I was not, though I often used to wish I had been.” “Anna…” His tone was concerned, and she found it needful in that moment to study her empty wine glass. “I have become maudlin by virtue of imbibing.” “Hush,” Westhaven chided, crawling across the blanket. He wrapped her in his arms then wrestled her down to lie beside him, her head on his shoulder. She cuddled into him, feeling abruptly cold except where his body lay along hers.
”
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Grace Burrowes (The Heir (Duke's Obsession, #1; Windham, #1))
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The genuine beliefs, though not usually the professed precepts, of parents and teachers are almost unconsciously acquired by most children; and even if they depart from these beliefs in later life, something of them remains deeply implanted, ready to emerge in a time of stress or crisis.
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Anonymous
“
Wayland was the shock. Suddenly they were stuck, her parents aware that they faced a life sentence of being foreign. In London her mother had been working toward a certificate in Montessori education, but in America she did not work, did not drive. She put on twenty pounds after Rahul was born, and her father put away his mod suits and shopped at Sears. In Wayland they became passive, wary, the rituals of small-town New England more confounding than negotiating two of the world's largest cities. They relied on their children, on Sudha especially. It was she who had to explain to her father that he had to gather up the leaves in bags, not just drag them with his rake to the woods opposite the house. She, with her perfect English, who called the repair department at Lechmere to have their appliances serviced. Rahul never considered it his duty to help their parents in this way. While Sudha regarded her parents' separation from India as an ailment that ebbed and flowed like a cancer, Rahul was impermeable to that aspect of their life as well. "No one dragged them here," he would say. "Baba left India to get rich, and Ma married him because she had nothing else to do." That was Rahul, always aware of the family's weaknesses, never sparing Sudha from the things she least wanted to face.
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Anonymous
“
Florida Adoption Step Parent Adoption Forms
There is more blended families in Florida than any time in the past. There are also many more parents who are looking to do a stepparent adoption to unify their family. The sad fact is that many children who are in a new home environment don?t have relationship with their natural mother or father.
This leaves children looking to their step parent to fill that role. In most cases, the step parent will take on the responsibility of raising and supporting his or her step child, and will develop a relationship with their step child which has the same bond as if the child was the stepparent?s biological child. In these situations, when the step child has been abandoned by an absent parent, a stepparent adoption can bring unity in the family, and provide many legal benefits for the child.
A Florida adoption Step Parent Adoption Forms is a straight-forward process. If one of the child?s biological parents has either abandoned the child, or is willing to sign a consent to adoption, then the adoption can be completed fairly easy, even if that parent?s whereabouts are unknown.
A stepparent adoption in Florida consists of filing the appropriate adoption documents with the court, serving the absent parent, and going through certain steps that are required to complete the adoption. In Florida, both the stepparent and the child?s biological parent will file a ?Joint Petition for Adoption by Stepparent?. The adoption petition will outline who the parties are, and will let the court know that the stepparent is desiring to adopt his or her step child.
Who is required to consent to a Florida adoption Step Parent Adoption Forms?
After the adoption paperwork has been filed with the Circuit Court in the county where you reside in Florida, the court will process the adoption forms. The adoption department at the Circuit Court will look to see if the consent from the absent parent can be waived due to abandonment, or if a signed consent is included in the forms. In addition, the court will look to see that the consent to adoption has been signed by any child being adopted who is at least 12 years of age.
If the absent parent has abandoned the child, meaning that he has failed to maintain a reasonable degree of interest, concern or responsibility as to the child?s welfare, and has failed to support the financial needs of the child, then the consent of the absent parent will not be required.
What happens when the Florida Stepparent Adoption is final?
The court will have a final hearing where the Judge will review all the information that has been presented and finalize the adoption. When the Judge signs a ?Final Judgment of Stepparent Adoption?, then the adoption is final.
When the adoption is final, the Judge will order the clerk of the court to have a new birth certificate issued, listing the stepparent as the child?s parent on the birth certificate, and also showing the child?s new name on the birth certificate.
As far as the birth certificate is concerned, the child was born with the new name and that the adoptive parents were the child?s birth parents.
How to start a stepparent adoption in Florida.
For anyone who has spoken to an adoption attorney regarding completing a Florida stepparent adoption, they quickly realize how expensive the process can be if they go through an attorney. The good news is that people in Florida have been doing their own step parent adoptions for decades, with the help from an online company, StepparentAdoptionForms.com.
Using an online adoption company like StepparentAdoptionForms.com allows you to complete your own Florida stepparent adoption, and save thousands over the cost of an attorney. Their experienced adoption specialists will prepare all your documents for you and send them to you ready to sign and file with the court.
You can do your own Florida stepparent adoption
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Stepparent Adoption
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Emissions of carbon dioxide reasonable commercial
For those who do not know each other with the phrase "carbon footprint" and its consequences or is questionable, which is headed "reasonable conversion" is a fast lens here.
Statements are described by the British coal climatic believe. "..The GC installed (fuel emissions) The issue has directly or indirectly affected by a company or work activities, products," only in relation to the application, especially to introduce a special procedure for the efforts of B. fight against carbon crank function
What is important?
Carbon dioxide ", uh, (on screen), the main fuel emissions" and the main result of global warming, improve a process that determines the atmosphere in the air in the heat as greenhouse gases greenhouse, carbon dioxide is reduced by the environment, methane, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs more typically classified as).
The consequences are disastrous in the sense of life on the planet.
The exchange is described at a reasonable price in Wikipedia as "...geared a social movement and market-based procedures, especially the objectives of the development of international guidelines and improve local sustainability." The activity is for the price "reasonable effort" as well as social and environmental criteria as part of the same in the direction of production. It focuses exclusively on exports under the auspices of the acquisition of the world's nations to coffee most international destinations, cocoa, sugar, tea, vegetables, wine, specially designed, refreshing fruits, bananas, chocolate and simple. In 2007 trade, the conversion of skilled gross sales serious enough alone suffered due the supermarket was in the direction of approximately US $ 3.62 billion to improve (2.39 million), rich environment and 47% within 12 months of the calendar year. Fair trade is often providing 1-20% of gross sales in their classification of medicines in Europe and North America, the United States. ..Properly Faith in the plan ... cursed interventions towards closing in failure "vice president Cato Industries, appointed to inquire into the meaning of fair trade Brink Lindsey 2003 '. "Sensible changes direction Lindsay inaccurate provides guidance to the market in a heart that continues to change a design style and price of the unit complies without success. It is based very difficult, and you must deliver or later although costs Rule implementation and reduces the cost if you have a little time in the mirror. You'll be able to afford the really wide range plan alternatives to products and expenditures price to pay here.
With the efficient configuration package offered in the interpretation question fraction "which is a collaboration with the Carbon Fund worldwide, and acceptable substitute?"
In the statement, which tend to be small, and more? They allow you to search for carbon dioxide transport and delivery. All vehicles are responsible dioxide pollution, but they are the worst offenders?
Aviation.
Quota of the EU said that the greenhouse gas jet fuel greenhouse on the basis of 87% since 1990 years Boeing Company, Boeing said more than 5 747 liters of fuel burns kilometer. Paul Charles, spokesman for Virgin Atlantic, said flight CO² gas burned in different periods of rule. For example: (. The United Kingdom) Jorge Chavez airport to fly only in the vast world of Peru to London Heathrow with British Family Islands 6.314 miles (10162 km) works with about 31,570 liters of kerosene, which produces changes in only 358 for the incredible carbon.
Delivery.
John Vidal, Environment Editor parents argue that research on the oil company BP and researchers from the Department of Physics and the environment in Germany Wising said that about once a year before the transport height of 600 to 800 million tons. This is simply nothing more than twice in Colombia and more than all African nations spend together.
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PointHero
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Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you’d need to be the chairman of MIT’s computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. “By 2020, a chip with today’s processing power will cost about a penny,” CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 “which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries—cell phone, Internet—that we all seem to take for granted.
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Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
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Department of State, has a long record of relentlessly prosecuting women who flee from abusive husbands or parents who want to force them into a marriage. Those women are often prosecuted on adultery charges, to clearly mark them as whores in society.
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Jenny Nordberg (The Underground Girls of Kabul: In Search of a Hidden Resistance in Afghanistan)
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That’s what children eventually were for their aging parents: custodians of technology, free personal IT departments keeping them from disappearing forever from the universal cloud.
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Christopher Bollen (Orient)
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Motorcycle or Trike Instruction Permit and Endorsement –These allow you to operate a motorcycle or a three-wheeled motorcycle-based vehicle on public roadways. For more information, see the Motorcycle Operator Manual or the Sidecar/Trike Operator Manual, available on our website or at any driver licensing office. Commercial Driver Instruction Permit (CDIP) and Commercial Driver License (CDL) –These allow you to operate a commercial vehicle on public roadways. For more information, see the Commercial Driver Guide available on our website or at any driver licensing office. Getting Your License You can get an instruction permit or a driver license at our driver licensing offices. We have more than 60 locations statewide. Some offices don’t offer testing, so before you come in, be sure the one you plan to visit offers the testing you need. Visit our website or check the Government section of the telephone book under “Licensing, Department of” for the office nearest you. To get an instruction permit, you must: • be at least 15-1/2 years old. • pass the knowledge test and the vision and medical screenings. • pay a $20 permit fee. If you are under 18, you must also bring your parent or guardian with you when you apply. He or she must show proof of identity and proof of relationship to you and must also sign a Parental Authorization Affidavit. When last names are different, we require more documents proving relationship. The permit is valid for one year and you can only renew it once3
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Anonymous
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What are the benefits of a Consolidation Loan?
Direct Consolidation Loans allow borrowers to combine one or more of their Federal education loans into a new loan that offers several advantages.
One Lender and One Monthly Payment
With only one lender and one monthly bill, it is easier than ever for borrowers to manage their debt. Borrowers have only one lender, the U.S. Department of Education, for all loans included in a Direct Consolidation Loan.
Flexible Repayment Options
Borrowers can choose from multiple plans to repay their Direct Consolidation Loan, including an Income Contingent Repayment Plan. These plans are designed to be flexible to meet the different and changing needs of borrowers. With a Direct Consolidation Loan, borrowers can switch repayment plans at anytime.
No Minimum or Maximum Loan Amounts
There is no minimum amount required to qualify for a Direct Consolidation Loan!
Varied Deferment Options
Borrowers with Direct Consolidation Loans may qualify for renewed deferment benefits. If borrowers have exhausted the deferment options on their current Federal education loans, a Direct Consolidation Loan may renew many of those deferment options. In addition, borrowers may be eligible for additional deferment options if they have an outstanding balance on a FFEL Program loan made before July 1, 1993, when they obtain their first Direct Loan.
Reduced Monthly Payments
A Direct Consolidation Loan may ease the strain on a borrower’s budget by lowering the borrower’s overall monthly payment. The minimum monthly payment on a Direct Consolidation Loan may be lower than the combined payments charged on a borrower’s Federal education loans.
Retention of Subsidy Benefits
There are two (2) possible portions to a Direct Consolidation Loan: Subsidized and Unsubsidized. Borrowers retain their subsidy benefits on loans that are consolidated into the subsidized portion of a Direct Consolidation Loan.
Temporary In-School Consolidation Authority
During a one (1) year period, borrowers who meet certain requirements may consolidate loans that are in an in-school status into a Direct Consolidation Loan. Direct Consolidation Loans may be made under this temporary provision to borrowers whose consolidation applications are received on or after July 1, 2010 and before July 1, 2011.
Borrowers will lose the grace period on a FFEL Subsidized/Unsubsidized Stafford Loan or Direct Subsidized/Unsubsidized Loan by consolidating the loan while it is in an in-school status. Similarly, PLUS borrowers who consolidate a Federal PLUS Loan or Direct PLUS Loan that was first disbursed on or after July 1, 2008 will lose the six (6) month post-enrollment deferment period. Parent PLUS borrowers who consolidate a Federal PLUS Loan or Direct PLUS Loan that was first disbursed on or after July 1, 2008 will lose eligibility to defer repayment while the student for whom the loan was obtained is in school. Click here for information on the eligibility requirements for this temporary provision.
For more Questions you can contact The Student Loan Help Center.
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The Student Loan Help Center
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The U.S. Department of Education changed the education privacy regulations in at least two crucial ways. Firstly, it increased the number of players that could have access to your child’s centralized personal data to include, not just your child’s teachers, but any organization or group tangentially involved in your child’s education. This can include testing, technology, textbook, and research companies, just to name a few examples. Secondly, it no longer requires parent notification or permission when it shares your child’s personal data with these chosen groups or companies.
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Brad McQueen (The Cult of Common Core: Obama's Final Solution for Your Child's Mind and Our Country's Exceptionalism)