Parental Involvement In Schools Quotes

We come into this world alone, and we die alone. If we get sick, we fight it alone. Our parents are not there to go through chemo treatments for us. They’re not the ones losing their hair, puking buckets, or getting their asses kicked at school. If we’re involved in an accident, they’re not the ones losing blood, fighting for their lives on the operating table, losing a limb. “I’m here for you” is the dumbest sentence I’d ever heard anyone say.

The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independance we must first invite dependance; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness.

Black girls are likened more to adults than to children and are treated as if they are willfully engaging in behaviors typically expected of Black women—sexual involvement, parenting or primary caregiving, workforce participation, and other adult behaviors and responsibilities. This compression is both a reflection of deeply entrenched biases that have stripped Black girls of their childhood freedoms and a function of an opportunity-starved social landscape that makes Black girlhood interchangeable with Black womanhood. It gives credence to a widely held perception and a message that there is little difference between the two.

10 ways to raise a wild child. Not everyone wants to raise wild, free thinking children. But for those of you who do, here's my tips: 1. Create safe space for them to be outside for a least an hour a day. Preferable barefoot & muddy. 2. Provide them with toys made of natural materials. Silks, wood, wool, etc...Toys that encourage them to use their imagination. If you're looking for ideas, Google: 'Waldorf Toys'. Avoid noisy plastic toys. Yea, maybe they'll learn their alphabet from the talking toys, but at the expense of their own unique thoughts. Plastic toys that talk and iPads in cribs should be illegal. Seriously! 3. Limit screen time. If you think you can manage video game time and your kids will be the rare ones that don't get addicted, then go for it. I'm not that good so we just avoid them completely. There's no cable in our house and no video games. The result is that my kids like being outside cause it's boring inside...hah! Best plan ever! No kid is going to remember that great day of video games or TV. Send them outside! 4. Feed them foods that support life. Fluoride free water, GMO free organic foods, snacks free of harsh preservatives and refined sugars. Good oils that support healthy brain development. Eat to live! 5. Don't helicopter parent. Stay connected and tuned into their needs and safety, but don't hover. Kids like adults need space to roam and explore without the constant voice of an adult telling them what to do. Give them freedom! 6. Read to them. Kids don't do what they are told, they do what they see. If you're on your phone all the time, they will likely be doing the same thing some day. If you're reading, writing and creating your art (painting, cooking...whatever your art is) they will likely want to join you. It's like Emilie Buchwald said, "Children become readers in the laps of their parents (or guardians)." - it's so true! 7. Let them speak their truth. Don't assume that because they are young that you know more than them. They were born into a different time than you. Give them room to respectfully speak their mind and not feel like you're going to attack them. You'll be surprised what you might learn. 8. Freedom to learn. I realize that not everyone can homeschool, but damn, if you can, do it! Our current schools system is far from the best ever. Our kids deserve better. We simply can't expect our children to all learn the same things in the same way. Not every kid is the same. The current system does not support the unique gifts of our children. How can they with so many kids in one classroom. It's no fault of the teachers, they are doing the best they can. Too many kids and not enough parent involvement. If you send your kids to school and expect they are getting all they need, you are sadly mistaken. Don't let the public school system raise your kids, it's not their job, it's yours! 9. Skip the fear based parenting tactics. It may work short term. But the long term results will be devastating to the child's ability to be open and truthful with you. Children need guidance, but scaring them into listening is just lazy. Find new ways to get through to your kids. Be creative! 10. There's no perfect way to be a parent, but there's a million ways to be a good one. Just because every other parent is doing it, doesn't mean it's right for you and your child. Don't let other people's opinions and judgments influence how you're going to treat your kid. Be brave enough to question everything until you find what works for you. Don't be lazy! Fight your urge to be passive about the things that matter. Don't give up on your kid. This is the most important work you'll ever do. Give it everything you have.

Because the truth was, and we both knew it, he'd gone long, long ago. I'd just made him stick around when he really wanted to be somewhere else. In his own weird way, he was another victim of the shooting, One of the ones who couldn't get away. "Are you mad?" he asked, which I thought was a really strange question. "Yes," I said. And I was. It's just that I wasn't so sure I was mad at him. But I don't think he needed to hear that part. I don't think he wanted to hear that part. I think it was important to him to hear that I cared enough to be angry. "Will you ever forgive me?" he asked. "Will you ever forgive me?" I shot back, leveling my gaze directly into his eyes. He stared into them for a few moments then got up silently and headed for the door. He didn't turn around when he reached it. Just grabbed the doorknob and held it. "No," he said without facing me. "Maybe that makes me a bad parent, but I don't know if I can. No matter what the police found, you were involved in that shooting, Valerie. You wrote those names on that list. You wrote my name on that list. You had a good life here. You might not have pulled the trigger, but you helped cause the tragedy." He opened the door."I'm sorry. I really am." He stepped out into the hallway. "I'll leave my new address and phone number with your mother," he said before walking slowly out of my sight.

Progress is hardly ever dramatic; in fact, it is usually very slow. As every parent and teacher knows, education is never a matter of ten-step plans or quick formulas, but of faithful commitment to the mundane challenges of daily life: getting up from the sofa to spend time with our children, loving them and disciplining them, becoming involved in their lives at school and, most important, making sure they have a wholesome family life to return to at home. Maybe that is why Jesus teaches us to ask for strength little by little, on a daily basis - "Give us this day our daily bread" - and why he stresses the significance of even the smallest, humblest beginnings: "Wherever two of you agree about anything you ask for, it shall be done for you... For where two or three come together in my name, I shall be with them" (Mt. 18:19-20).

As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me. One such example: my mother never mended my clothes. I remember going to her when I was in the early grades of elementary school, with holes in both socks of my favorite pair. My mom had just had her sixth child and was deeply involved in our church activities. She was very, very busy. Our family had no extra money anywhere, so buying new socks was just out of the question. So she told me to go string thread through a needle, and to come back when I had done it. That accomplished—it took me about ten minutes, whereas I’m sure she could have done it in ten seconds—she took one of the socks and showed me how to run the needle in and out around the periphery of the hole, rather than back and forth across the hole, and then simply to draw the hole closed. This took her about thirty seconds. Finally, she showed me how to cut and knot the thread. She then handed me the second sock, and went on her way. A year or so later—I probably was in third grade—I fell down on the playground at school and ripped my Levi’s. This was serious, because I had the standard family ration of two pairs of school trousers. So I took them to my mom and asked if she could repair them. She showed me how to set up and operate her sewing machine, including switching it to a zigzag stitch; gave me an idea or two about how she might try to repair it if it were she who was going to do the repair, and then went on her way. I sat there clueless at first, but eventually figured it out. Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement. It’s funny, but every time I put those socks on until they were threadbare, I looked at that repair in the toe and thought, “I did that.” I have no memory now of what the repair to the knee of those Levi’s looked like, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. When I looked at it, however, it didn’t occur to me that I might not have done a perfect mending job. I only felt pride that I had done it. As for my mom, I have wondered what

when affluent, educated parents decide to homeschool, public schools lose out on involved PTA parents and capable school-improvement advocates. Or when parents spend all their money and energy searching for the best organic baby products, there’s little energy left to lobby for consumer product regulations that might benefit everyone.

Jenna, you have Vix, and Archer, you have…Actually, what do you have?” “You,” he said firmly. “And a whole bunch of holy knights who want to kill me.” “Vix can visit,” Jenna said. “And the school will be a good place now, so it’s not like one more year will be torture. Although,” she said, frowning, “I will admit the place is pretty awful to look at. I don’t know how we’re going to fix that.” Facing the pond, staring at that green, green grass, I gave a shuddery laugh. “I don’t think we have to worry about the island,” I said, wiping stray tears with the back of my hand. “It’s being healed.” “Well, there you have it, then,” Archer said. “Vix can come for a visit, the island will eventually be a heck of a lot less depressing, and I’m not leaving you ever again.” “Yeah, and we still have to deal with The Eye being…Eyeish, and me learning to be Head of the Council, which will probably involve lots of boring books and-“ Archer pressed his mouth to mine, effectively shutting me up and kissing the hell out of me. When he pulled back, he was grinning. “And you have an arrogant, screwed-up former demon hunter who is stupidly in love with you.” “And an angsty vampire who will walk into hell with you. Actually, who has walked into hell with you,” Jenna added, coming around to my other side. “And parents who love you, and who are probably making out back at the car,” Archer said, and I laughed. “So, really,” Jenna said, and looped her arm through mine, “what more do you need?” I looked back and forth between them, these two people I loved so much. The breeze ruffled the tall grass around the pond, and I thought I could hear Elodie’s laugh. “Nothing,” I told them, squeezing both their hands. “Nothing.

One of the most serious blows to American education has been the loss of parent involvement. Many parents, for various reasons, including increasing work pressures, have stepped back from their children’s education. Schools—willingly or not—now often find themselves educating children without a strong partnership with parents. From that distance, parents are left feeling guilty and empty-handed.

What we, and others, often fail to realise is the depth and reach of our loss: that not only will we never have children, but we will never create our own family. We will never watch them grow up, never throw children's birthday parties, never take that 'first day at school' photo, never teach them to ride a bike. We'll never see them graduate, never see them possibly get married and have their own children. We'll never get a chance to heal the wounds of our own childhood by doing things differently with our children. We'll never be grandmothers and never give the gift of grandchildren to our parents. We'll never be the mother of our partner's children and hold that precious place in their heart. We'll never stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our siblings and watch our children play together. We'll never be part of the community of mothers, never be considered a 'real' woman. And when we die, there is no one to leave our stuff to, and no one to take our lifetime's learnings into the next generation. If you take the time to think about it all in one go, which is more than most of us are ever likely to do because of the breathtaking amount of pain involved, it's a testament to our strength that we're still standing at all.

There are two groups of people who have a history of trying to join Christian support group and move into leadership under false pretenses. The first of these are white supremacists, many of whom are involved in neo-Nazi or survivalist groups....The second group seeking admittance in increasing numbers to local support groups are homosexual and lesbian parents. God's Word clearly condemns these sexual perversions. Again, to keep these people out, you need a clear statement in the founding documents

They suspected that children learned best through undirected free play—and that a child’s psyche was sensitive and fragile. During the 1980s and 1990s, American parents and teachers had been bombarded by claims that children’s self-esteem needed to be protected from competition (and reality) in order for them to succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In most of the countries where parents took the PISA survey, parents who participated in a PTA had teenagers who performed worse in reading. Korean parenting, by contrast, were coaches. Coach parents cared deeply about their children, too. Yet they spent less time attending school events and more time training their children at home: reading to them, quizzing them on their multiplication tables while they were cooking dinner, and pushing them to try harder. They saw education as one of their jobs.

A third positive result even further from the traditional tool kit of financial incentives comes from a recent randomized control trial conducted in the U.K., using the increasingly popular and low-cost method of text reminders. This intervention involved sending texts to half the parents in some school in advance of a major math test to let them know that their child had a test coming up in five days, then in three days, then in one day. The researchers call this approach “pre-informing.” The other half of parents did not receive the texts. The pre-informing texts increased student performance on the math test by the equivalent of one additional month of schooling, and students in the bottom quartile benefited most. These children gained the equivalent of two additional months of schooling, relative to the control group. Afterward, both parents and students said they wanted to stick with the program, showing that they appreciated being nudged. This program also belies the frequent claim, unsupported by any evidence, that nudges must be secret to be effective.

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.

attachment is the first priority of living things. It is only when there is some release from this preoccupation that maturation can occur. In plants, the roots must first take hold for growth to commence and bearing fruit to become a possibility. For children, the ultimate agenda of becoming viable as a separate being can take over only when their needs are met for attachment, for nurturing contact, and for being able to depend on the relationship unconditionally. Few parents, and even fewer experts, understand this intuitively. “When I became a parent,” one thoughtful father who did understand said to me, “I saw that the world seemed absolutely convinced that you must form your children — actively form their characters rather than simply create an environment in which they can develop and thrive. Nobody seemed to get that if you give them the loving connection they need, they will flourish.” The key to activating maturation is to take care of the attachment needs of the child. To foster independence we must first invite dependence; to promote individuation we must provide a sense of belonging and unity; to help the child separate we must assume the responsibility for keeping the child close. We help a child let go by providing more contact and connection than he himself is seeking. When he asks for a hug, we give him a warmer one than he is giving us. We liberate children not by making them work for our love but by letting them rest in it. We help a child face the separation involved in going to sleep or going to school by satisfying his need for closeness. Thus the story of maturation is one of paradox: dependence and attachment foster independence and genuine separation. Attachment is the womb of maturation. Just as the biological womb gives birth to a separate being in the physical sense, attachment gives birth to a separate being in the psychological sense. Following physical birth, the developmental agenda is to form an emotional attachment wombfor the child from which he can be born once again as an autonomous individual, capable of functioning without being dominated by attachment drives.

This kind of parenting was typical in much of Asia—and among Asian immigrant parents living in the United States. Contrary to the stereotype, it did not necessarily make children miserable. In fact, children raised in this way in the United States tended not only to do better in school but to actually enjoy reading and school more than their Caucasian peers enrolled in the same schools. While American parents gave their kids placemats with numbers on them and called it a day, Asian parents taught their children to add before they could read. They did it systematically and directly, say, from six-thirty to seven each night, with a workbook—not organically, the way many American parents preferred their children to learn math. The coach parent did not necessarily have to earn a lot of money or be highly educated. Nor did a coach parent have to be Asian, needless to say. The research showed that European-American parents who acted more like coaches tended to raise smarter kids, too. Parents who read to their children weekly or daily when they were young raised children who scored twenty-five points higher on PISA by the time they were fifteen years old. That was almost a full year of learning. More affluent parents were more likely to read to their children almost everywhere, but even among families within the same socioeconomic group, parents who read to their children tended to raise kids who scored fourteen points higher on PISA. By contrast, parents who regularly played with alphabet toys with their young children saw no such benefit. And at least one high-impact form of parental involvement did not actually involve kids or schools at all: If parents simply read for pleasure at home on their own, their children were more likely to enjoy reading, too. That pattern held fast across very different countries and different levels of family income. Kids could see what parents valued, and it mattered more than what parents said. Only four in ten parents in the PISA survey regularly read at home for enjoyment. What if they knew that this one change—which they might even vaguely enjoy—would help their children become better readers themselves? What if schools, instead of pleading with parents to donate time, muffins, or money, loaned books and magazines to parents and urged them to read on their own and talk about what they’d read in order to help their kids? The evidence suggested that every parent could do things that helped create strong readers and thinkers, once they knew what those things were. Parents could go too far with the drills and practice in academics, just as they could in sports, and many, many Korean parents did go too far. The opposite was also true. A coddled, moon bounce of a childhood could lead to young adults who had never experienced failure or developed self-control or endurance—experiences that mattered as much or more than academic skills. The evidence suggested that many American parents treated their children as if they were delicate flowers. In one Columbia University study, 85 percent of American parents surveyed said that they thought they needed to praise their children’s intelligence in order to assure them they were smart. However, the actual research on praise suggested the opposite was true. Praise that was vague, insincere, or excessive tended to discourage kids from working hard and trying new things. It had a toxic effect, the opposite of what parents intended. To work, praise had to be specific, authentic, and rare. Yet the same culture of self-esteem boosting extended to many U.S. classrooms.

Have you found it different having girls in the house?” He cleared his throat. “Oh, yeah.” “Would you care to elaborate?” “Nope.” I looked up from my writing. “If you don’t elaborate, it’s going to be a very short article.” “Look, I’ve already gotten into it once tonight--” “Are you implying I’m hard to live with? Is that why you won’t comment further? Because you think I’ll be offended? I won’t be.” “No further comment.” I sighed, tempted to toss the recorder at him. “Okay, then, we’ll move on. What’s been the most difficult aspect of living with us?” There was silence, but it was the kind where you can sense someone wants to speak but doesn’t. Jason was so incredibly still, as though he was weighing consequences. “Not kissing you,” he finally said, quietly. My heart did this little stutter. I just stared at him as the recorder continued to run, searching for sound. My hand was shaking when I reached over and turned it off. “But you did kiss me, and you said it was a mistake.” “Because getting involved with you is a bad idea, on so many levels.” “Care to share one of those levels?” “I’m living in your house. Your parents are giving me a roof over my head. Your mom brings home extra takeout. I’m here only for the summer. Then I’m back at school.” He reached up, removed the ice pack from around his shoulder, and set it on the table. “And Mac? After we went to Dave and Bubba’s, he comes out to the mound and tells me he thinks you’re hot. And I know you like him, so I was willing to bunt.” “Bunt?” “Willing to sacrifice my happiness.” “You thought you’d be happy being with me?” “Are you kidding? You’re cute, easy to talk to. You love baseball. You make me smile, make me laugh. And we won’t even mention how much I liked kissing you.” Only he had mentioned it. And now I was thinking about it when I really shouldn’t be.

Mommy’s contradictions crashed and slammed against one another like bumper cars at Coney Island. White folks, she felt, were implicitly evil toward blacks, yet she forced us to go to white schools to get the best education. Blacks could be trusted more, but anything involving blacks was probably slightly substandard. She disliked people with money yet was in constant need of it. She couldn’t stand racists of either color and had great distaste for bourgeois blacks who sought to emulate rich whites by putting on airs and “doing silly things like covering their couches with plastic and holding teacups with their pinkies out.” “What fools!” she’d hiss. She wouldn’t be bothered with parents who bragged about their children’s accomplishments, yet she insisted we strive for the highest professional goals. She was against welfare and never applied for it despite our need, but championed those who availed themselves of it.

I don’t know if I’ll get in at Stanford,” one premed said to me after he had sent in his application. “Or anywhere else,” he added. Another mentioned a different school, but the students’ worries were essentially the same. I seldom got involved in what I called freaking out, but this kind of talk happened often, especially during our senior year. One time when this freaking out was going on and I didn’t enter in, one of my friends turned to me, “Carson, aren’t you worried?” “No,” I said. “I’m going to the University of Michigan Medical School.” “How can you be so sure?” “It’s real simple. My father owns the university.” “Did you hear that?” he yelled at one of the others. “Carson’s old man owns the University of Michigan.” Several students were impressed. And understandably because they came from extremely wealthy homes. Their parents owned great industries. Actually, I had been teasing, and maybe it wasn’t playing fair. As a Chrisitan, I believe that God— my Heavenly Father— not only created the universe, but He controls it. And, by extension, God owns the University of Michigan and everything else. I never did explain.

The biggest fear for homeschooled children is that they will be unable to relate to their peers, will not have friends, or that they will otherwise be unable to interact with people in a normal way. Consider this: How many of your daily interactions with people are solely with people of your own birth year?  We’re not considering interactions with people who are a year or two older or a year or two younger, but specifically people who were born within a few months of your birthday. In society, it would be very odd to section people at work by their birth year and allow you to interact only with persons your same age. This artificial constraint would limit your understanding of people and society across a broader range of ages. In traditional schools, children are placed in grades artificially constrained by the child’s birth date and an arbitrary cut-off day on a school calendar. Every student is taught the same thing as everyone else of the same age primarily because it is a convenient way to manage a large number of students. Students are not grouped that way because there is any inherent special socialization that occurs when grouping children in such a manner. Sectioning off children into narrow bands of same-age peers does not make them better able to interact with society at large. In fact, sectioning off children in this way does just the opposite—it restricts their ability to practice interacting with a wide variety of people. So why do we worry about homeschooled children’s socialization?  The erroneous assumption is that the child will be homeschooled and will be at home, schooling in the house, all day every day, with no interactions with other people. Unless a family is remotely located in a desolate place away from any form of civilization, social isolation is highly unlikely. Every homeschooling family I know involves their children in daily life—going to the grocery store or the bank, running errands, volunteering in the community, or participating in sports, arts, or community classes. Within the homeschooled community, sports, arts, drama, co-op classes, etc., are usually sectioned by elementary, pre-teen, and teen groupings. This allows students to interact with a wider range of children, and the interactions usually enhance a child’s ability to interact well with a wider age-range of students. Additionally, being out in the community provides many opportunities for children to interact with people of all ages. When homeschooling groups plan field trips, there are sometimes constraints on the age range, depending upon the destination, but many times the trip is open to children of all ages. As an example, when our group went on a field trip to the Federal Reserve Bank, all ages of children attended. The tour and information were of interest to all of the children in one way or another. After the tour, our group dined at a nearby food court. The parents sat together to chat and the children all sat with each other, with kids of all ages talking and having fun with each other. When interacting with society, exposure to a wider variety of people makes for better overall socialization. Many homeschooling groups also have park days, game days, or play days that allow all of the children in the homeschooled community to come together and play. Usually such social opportunities last for two, three, or four hours. Our group used to have Friday afternoon “Park Day.”  After our morning studies, we would pack a picnic lunch, drive to the park, and spend the rest of the afternoon letting the kids run and play. Older kids would organize games and play with younger kids, which let them practice great leadership skills. The younger kids truly looked up to and enjoyed being included in games with the older kids.

Hanging around them made Charlie feel like maybe there wasn’t anything wrong with her. It didn’t matter if she didn’t fit in at school, or that her body kept changing on her. It was okay when her best friend’s parents took one look at Charlie and clocked her for trouble. When even Laura herself, who’d known her since she was eight, started acting weird. It was fine that she’d given up hoping her mother would notice there was something strange about Rand taking her on trips all the time. All those people who judged her or couldn’t be bothered with her were marks. She’d have the last laugh. “You gotta be like a shark in this business,” Benny told her with his soft voice and slicked-back hair. “Sniff around for blood in the water. Greet life teeth first. And no matter what, never stop swimming.” Charlie took that advice and the money from her last job with Rand and got a tattoo. She’d wanted one, and she’d also wanting to know if she could con a shop into giving her ink, even though she was three years away from eighteen. It involved some fast talking and swiping a notary sigil, but she got it done. Her first tattoo. It was still a little bit sore when she moved. Along her inner arm was the word “fearless” in looping cursive letters, except the tattooist had spaced them oddly so that it looked as though it said “fear less.” It reminded her of what she wanted to be, and that her body belonged to her. She could write all over it if she wanted.

Many opponents of same-sex pseudogamy argue that the pretense that a man can marry another man will involve restrictions on the religious freedom of those who disagree. I don’t believe there’s much to dispute here. One side says that same sex-marriage will restrict religious liberty, and believes that that would be disgraceful and unjust; the other side says the same, and believes it is high time, and that the restrictions should have been laid down long ago. So when Fred Henry, the moderate liberal Catholic bishop of Edmonton, says that there is something intrinsically disordered about same-sex pseudogamous relations, he is dragged before a Canadian human rights tribunal, without anyone sensing the irony (one suspects that the leaders of George Orwell’s Oceania at least indulged in a little mordant irony when they named their center of torment the Ministry of Love). Or when the Knights of Columbus find out that a gay couple has signed a lease for their hall to celebrate their pseudo-nuptials, and the chief retracts the invitation and offers to help the couple find another acceptable hall, the Knights are dragged into court. The same with the widow who ekes out her living by baking wedding cakes. And the parents in Massachusetts who don’t want their children to be exposed to homosexual propaganda in the schools. And the Catholic adoption agency in Massachusetts that had to shut down rather than violate their morals, as the state demanded they do, placing children in pseudogamous households.

Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.” “What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked. “You do?” Ben sounded surprised. “I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said. “Really…because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said. “I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell u something? “I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.” “Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said. “Deal ‘em,” Ben said. Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy. “Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?” “European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.” Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?” “I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did.” Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions. “So which of Shakespeare’s plays do you think was better served by the Globe Theatre: Henry VIII or Troilus and Cressida?” Ben asked, cracking his knuckles. “Troilus and Cressida was never performed at the Globe,” Sage replied. “As for Henry VIII, the original Globe caught fire during the show and burned to the ground, so I’d say that’s the show that really brought down the house…wouldn’t you?” “Nice…very nice.” Ben nodded. “Well done.” It was the cerebral version of bamboo under the fingernails, and while they both tried to seem casual about their conversation, they were soon leaning forward with sweat beading on their brows. It was fascinating…and weird. After several hours of this, Ben had to admit that he’d found a historical peer, and he gleefully involved Sage in all kinds of debates about the minutiae of eras I knew nothing about…except that I had the nagging sense I might have been there for some of them. For his part, Sage seemed to relish talking about the past with someone who could truly appreciate the detailed anecdotes and stories he’d discovered in his “research.” By the time we started our descent to Miami, the two were leaning over my seat to chat and laugh together. On the very full flight from Miami to New York, Ben and Sage took the two seats next to each other and gabbed and giggled like middle-school girls. I sat across from them stuck next to an older woman wearing far too much perfume.

Basically, attention follows attachment. The stronger the attachment, the easier it is to secure the child's attention. When attachment is weak, the attention of the child will be correspondingly difficult to engage. One of the telltale signs of a child who isn't paying attention is a parent having continually to raise his voice or repeat things. Some of our most persistent demands as parents have to do with their attention: “Listen to me,” “Look at me when I'm talking,” “Now look here,” “What did I just say?” or most simply, “Pay attention.” When children become peer-oriented, their attention instinctively turns toward peers. It goes against the natural instincts of a peer-oriented child to attend to parents or teachers. The sounds emanating from adults are regarded by the child's attention mechanisms as so much noise and interference, lacking in meaning and relevance to the attachment needs that dominate his emotional life. Peer orientation creates deficits in the child's attention to adults because adults are not top priority in the attention hierarchy of peer-oriented children. It is no accident that attention deficit disorder was initially considered a school problem, a child's failing to pay attention to the teacher. It is also no accident that the explosion in the number of diagnosed cases of attention deficit disorder has paralleled the evolution of peer orientation in our society and is worse where peer orientation is most predominant — urban centers and inner-city schools. This is not to suggest that all problems in paying attention stem from this source and that there are no other factors involved in ADD. On the other hand, not to recognize the fundamental role of attachment in governing attention is to ignore the reality of many children diagnosed with ADD. Deficits in attachments to adults contribute significantly to deficits in attention to adults. If attachment is disordered, attention will also be disordered.

You might expect that if you spent such an extended period in twelve different households, what you would gather is twelve different ideas about how to raise children: there would be the strict parents and the lax parents and the hyperinvolved parents and the mellow parents and on and on. What Lareau found, however, is something much different. There were only two parenting “philosophies,” and they divided almost perfectly along class lines. The wealthier parents raised their kids one way, and the poorer parents raised their kids another way. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children’s free time, shuttling them from one activity to the next, quizzing them about their teachers and coaches and teammates. One of the well-off children Lareau followed played on a baseball team, two soccer teams, a swim team, and a basketball team in the summer, as well as playing in an orchestra and taking piano lessons. That kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. Play for them wasn’t soccer practice twice a week. It was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood. What a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential. One girl from a working-class family—Katie Brindle—sang in a choir after school. But she signed up for it herself and walked to choir practice on her own. Lareau writes: What Mrs. Brindle doesn’t do that is routine for middle-class mothers is view her daughter’s interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal talent. Similarly Mrs. Brindle does not discuss Katie’s interest in drama or express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter’s talent. Instead she frames Katie’s skills and interests as character traits—singing and acting are part of what makes Katie “Katie.” She sees the shows her daughter puts on as “cute” and as a way for Katie to “get attention.

Any parent would be dismayed to think that this was their child’s experience of learning, of socializing, and of herself. Maya is an introvert; she is out of her element in a noisy and overstimulating classroom where lessons are taught in large groups. Her teacher told me that she’d do much better in a school with a calm atmosphere where she could work with other kids who are “equally hardworking and attentive to detail,” and where a larger portion of the day would involve independent work. Maya needs to learn to assert herself in groups, of course, but will experiences like the one I witnessed teach her this skill? The truth is that many schools are designed for extroverts. Introverts need different kinds of instruction from extroverts, write College of William and Mary education scholars Jill Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. And too often, “very little is made available to that learner except constant advice on becoming more social and gregarious.” We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself. The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass. Academic classes are dominated by group discussions in which a teacher prods him to speak up. He eats lunch in the cacophonous din of the cafeteria, where he has to jockey for a place at a crowded table. Worst of all, there’s little time to think or create. The structure of the day is almost guaranteed to sap his energy rather than stimulate it. Why do we accept this one-size-fits-all situation as a given when we know perfectly well that adults don’t organize themselves this way? We often marvel at how introverted, geeky kids “blossom” into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it’s not the children who change but their environments. As adults, they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don’t have to live in whatever culture they’re plunked into. Research from a field known as “person-environment fit” shows that people flourish when, in the words of psychologist Brian Little, they’re “engaged in occupations, roles or settings that are concordant with their personalities.” The inverse is also true: kids stop learning when they feel emotionally threatened.

Effective crime reduction policies involved early parenting classes, increasing the quality of education that children received, and providing children with a safe environment after school. 

Hindus and Muslims are unlikely to resolve the issue of whether a temple or a mosque should be built at Ayodhya by building both, or neither, or a syncretic building that is both a mosque and a temple. Nor can what might seem to be a straightforward territorial question between Albanian Muslims and Orthodox Serbs concerning Kosovo or between Jews and Arabs concerning Jerusalem be easily settled, since each place has deep historical, cultural, and emotional meaning to both peoples. Similarly, neither French authorities nor Muslim parents are likely to accept a compromise which would allow schoolgirls to wear Muslim dress every other day during the school year. Cultural questions like these involve a yes or no, zero-sum choice.

The work of meaningful student involvement is not easy or instantly rewarding. It demands that the system of schooling change, and that the attitudes of students, educators, parents and community members change.

The difference between the generations of parents and children always exists, yet, ours seemed very sharp. Religious parents, Father a merchant, closely involved with the synagogue and charities, fighting to keep a middle class home going - while the children were growing up under new and different influences. Of course, I looked up to Sali, who was highly intelligent and was part and parcel of a group of high school students, all moving in the direction of socialism. It was the time of the Weimar Republic in Germany, a time of social ferment, of industrialization, of inflation, of unemployment. I moved, unaware of the facts, into a similar direction as Sali.

Many students described their parents’ support in nonacademic activities as being equal to their support in school. Importantly, they felt this support was instrumental in helping them do well academically because it was viewed as a general interest in their life overall

They mentioned things such as, “They were supportive in life”; “They attended my band concerts”; “They left schooling up to me”; or “They did not talk much at all about school.” At one point students were asked, “Did any of your parents read books to you when you were a child, join PTA meetings, regularly converse with your teachers, or discuss college plans with you?

Respect: If your son is raised connecting the word respect with the following statements: “I respect the choice you are making to wear your sandals; I will be wearing my rain boots.” “I can see how upset you are, and I love you and respect you too much to fight with you, so I am going to go outside until I cool down and then we can talk about what happened.” “I know you like having the same lunch every day, so I bought you everything you need to make the lunch that you like.” “I can see that the way you organize your clothes really works for you.” “I can feel myself getting angry, so I am going to go cool down and think about how I feel about the situation and then maybe we can find a solution that works for all of us.” “I respect your choice not to work on your science project and I hope you can respect my choice not to get involved in the decision your teacher makes.” “I know your uncle can be very judgmental and in spite of that, you showed respect for his point of view and for the rest of the family by not arguing with him over dinner.” … it is reasonable that you will raise a son who has a healthy concept of what respect looks like, sounds like, and feels like in a relationship with others. Message: Respect is a two-way street and we both participate. Cooperation: If your daughter is raised hearing: “How about you carry the jacket to the car just in case the weather changes? If you decide not to wear it, that’s fine, but at least you will have it with you.” “Would you be willing to help me out at the store and be in charge of crossing things off my list and then paying the cashier while I bag the groceries?” “I am not going to have time tonight to help you with your project, but if you are willing to get up an hour early tomorrow morning I could help you then.” “I promised your brother I would make him a cake and I am wondering if you would like me to teach you so we can make our cakes together from now on.” “I am willing to watch thirty minutes of your show, even though you know it’s not my favorite, before I go to the other room to read.” “We have a lot of camping gear to set up, how do we want to divide up the jobs?” … it is reasonable that you will raise a daughter who has a healthy concept of what cooperation looks like, sounds like, and feels like in a relationship with others. Message: Cooperation is a willingness to work together. Responsibility: If your children are raised hearing: “I trust you can find another pair of mittens to wear today at school.” “Only you can decide how much lunch you will eat.” “I don’t know where you put your soccer shoes. I put mine in the hall closet.” “I’m sorry, but I won’t bring the homework that you left on the counter.” “You told the coach that you would put in the extra time outside of practice; you’ll have to explain to him why that didn’t happen.” “Do you have a plan for replacing the broken window?” “I understand that you are frustrated. I am following through with our agreement.” … it is reasonable that you will raise children who have a healthy concept of what responsibility looks like, sounds like, and feels like in a relationship with others. Message: Responsibility is being able to respond effectively to the situation at hand.

Apparently many professionals do not truly believe that the need to honor our connections is an essential part of family life, as this belief is not reflected in the way that they work with families in stress who are dealing with complex issues of foster care, guardianship, kinship, and adoption. Whether it was a closed or open adoption, an adopted child must learn to integrate at least two distinctly different families—the birth family and the adoptive family. The biracial or other-culture child must also integrate two distinctly different cultures. The challenge to adoptive parents, and to others connected to this child, is to help the child to develop his/her own identity within the framework of both cultures. The challenge to professionals is to help the whole family to see itself as a multicultural family, and to develop its identity while integrating—not ignoring—the distinctively different cultures. How can that happen if the professionals don’t see the importance of respect for culture? How can that happen if the professionals don’t see any difference in culture because the race is the same? The psycho-education and modeling done by the professionals who are initially involved in building these complex families can set a tone, and begin a process of respect and integration. Without this education and modeling, the parents might be so busy with other essential psychological and emotional issues, and with possible trauma management for this child, that they might ignore the very important issues of culture and development of identity. Without that awareness, how will the parents be prepared to model and teach the larger community—the schools, courts, religious institutions, and neighborhoods—thereby creating a holding environment for that child that both honors and respects all of who he/she is?

FOR MY SPIRITUAL LIFE... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to help others... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my relationship with God... ? FOR MY PHYSICAL HEALTH... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to achieve my diet goals... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to ensure that I exercise... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to relieve my stress... ? FOR MY PERSONAL LIFE... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my skill at ________... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to find time for myself... ? FOR MY KEY RELATIONSHIPS... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my relationship with my spouse/partner... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my children’s school performance... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to show my appreciation to my parents... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to make my family stronger... ? FOR MY JOB... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to ensure that I hit my goals... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my skills... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to help my team succeed... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to further my career... ? FOR MY BUSINESS... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to make us more competitive... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to make our product the best... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to make us more profitable... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve our customer experience... ? FOR MY FINANCES... What’s the ONE Thing I can do to increase my net worth... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to improve my investment cash flow... ? What’s the ONE Thing I can do to eliminate my credit card debt... ? BIG IDEAS So how do you make The ONE Thing part of your daily routine? How do you make it strong enough to get extraordinary results at work and in the other areas of your life? Here’s a starter list drawn from our experience and our work with others. Understand and believe it. The first step is to understand the concept of the ONE Thing, then to believe that it can make a difference in your life. If you don’t understand and believe, you won’t take action. Use it. Ask yourself the Focusing Question. Start each day by asking, “What’s the ONE Thing I can do today for [whatever you want] such that by doing it everything else will be easier or even unnecessary?” When you do this, your direction will become clear. Your work will be more productive and your personal life more rewarding. Make it a habit. When you make asking the Focusing Question a habit, you fully engage its power to get the extraordinary results you want. It’s a difference maker. Research says this will take about 66 days. Whether it takes you a few weeks or a few months, stick with it until it becomes your routine. If you’re not serious about learning the Success Habit, you’re not serious about getting extraordinary results. Leverage reminders. Set up ways to remind yourself to use the Focusing Question. One of the best ways to do this is to put up a sign at work that says, “Until my ONE Thing is done—everything else is a distraction.” We designed the back cover of this book to be a trigger —set it on the corner of your desk so that it’s the first thing you see when you get to work. Use notes, screen savers, and calendar cues to keep making the connection between the Success Habit and the results you seek. Put up reminders like, “The ONE Thing = Extraordinary Results” or “The Success Habit Will Get Me to My Goal.” Recruit support. Research shows that those around you can influence you tremendously. Starting a success support group with some of your work colleagues can help inspire all of you to practice the Success Habit every day. Get your family involved. Share your ONE Thing. Get them on board. Use the Focusing Question around them to show them how the Success Habit can make a difference in their school work, their personal achievements, or any other part of their lives.

My involvement, from my very first days in Haiti, caused me to rethink the common practice of American groups coming in and building, or supporting, orphanages without truly understanding the situation in Haiti. Especially since the plague of unemployment is so huge that it is believed 80 percent of all orphans end up in orphanages as a result of poverty. These “poverty orphans” are brought to orphanages mostly because their parents are unable to pay for food and school. Normally, American orphanages, or American-supported orphanages, pay for schooling for the children as well as for food, so to struggling parents these institutions look like the best and only option. However, with as many as 80 percent of orphans having a living parent, the rage to come to Haiti and build orphanages for these children seemed both broken and incongruous. I realized that often what America thinks is the best for children is sometimes just a quick fix, a temporary Band-Aid that may ultimately exacerbate the situation. I knew there had to be a better way.

Sitting through a classroom lecture is painful for most people most of the time. We all know this, yet so many deny it or view it as a personal failing. When human beings are required to sit and listen, we squirm. We watch the clock tick slowly. Minutes can seem like hours. We escape into our own head. We invent activities to either occupy or numb ourselves. The most talented classroom sitters create micro-tasks to busy their hands and the other 80 percent of their minds. The pain is cumulative. The first hour of lecture in a day is bearable. The second is hard. The third is white-hot excruciating. The highly engaging presenter who periodically arises in the classroom does little to soften the physiological impact of the subsequent dull one. This reality goes beyond a power thing, or even an interest thing, or a quality of the teacher thing. Even when corporate leaders and heads of state attend highly relevant daylong events at which they listen to the highest-tier speakers, they are suppressing their own body ticks 90 minutes into the lecture. The lunch break becomes an oasis. Students are psychologically ravished daily by this onslaught. And it is costly on all involved—teachers, administrators, parents, siblings. Although this recommendation subverts most industrial business and logistics models, 2 non-adjacent hours of lecture a day should be the greatest number for any institution or program. And the most successful will have even less than that. This requires an alternative approach.

Well, I considered burning this place down as a warning, but that was counterproductive as it’s in the middle of a forest. So I was going to threaten you to leave, but I don’t have the time to go around checking that you’ve actually done anything.” I stood and folded the chair, placing it over by the rest. “No, I figured I’d come here to tell you that, while no one has any proof of your wrongdoings, we all know what you did. This coven has been marked because of your actions, and Avalon will be keeping a very close eye on you. Not because we believe you’re doing anything wrong, of course, but because you were involved in a traumatic event in Germany, and they want to make certain you’re all okay. “There will be site visits, probably at random, maybe in the middle of the night. There might even be interviews with all the members, just to verify that everyone is happy and healthy.” “You can’t do that,” Mara said with barely contained rage. “I’m not. Avalon is—well, technically, Lucie is, but she helps run the place, so she’s probably qualified to tell whether people here are happy and healthy. Did I mention the random visits?” “You think this is funny?” Emily asked. I shook my head. “I think it’s deadly serious. A group of witches used by Demeter and Hera broke Cronus out of Tartarus, witches who used the coven leader’s own daughter to get the job done.” My stare could have bored holes in Mara. “Emily, I’m not going to underestimate you again. I promise you that. And Mara, dear sweet Mara. Your daughter is a delight. If you remove her from school, if you hurt her, if anything happens to her in any way that results in my friend’s daughter telling me of her unhappiness at your parenting, I will come find you. And I promise, once I’m done, no one will ever find out what happened to you.” I made my way toward the door, my piece said. “You think that you can threaten me, Mister Garrett?” Mara said, her body shaking with anger. I continued walking and opened the door before pausing for a second. “You can’t come into my coven and demand things,” Mara continued. “You’re a thug, a man with no vision who does what his masters tell him. I’m not afraid of you. You don’t scare me.” I didn’t turn back toward the two women as I spoke, “Then clearly you

Our school wasn’t perceived as a good school, but this was just accepted. No one was disappointed in how we were performing. It was almost like, ‘Hey, you’re doing a good job with what you’ve got.’ It was fine to be what we were. That second year was when we really started to think about what we wanted to be about. We needed to get the kids to the point where they wanted to be here. We spent the whole year developing our mission and vision. That’s when we realized that we needed to get to know these kids. It was a very long process with involvement from teachers, students, business partners, and community members. We organized a parent-teacher organization. I believe a lot of the teachers believed in the kids, but holistically as a school, I don’t think we believed in the kids, and our community didn’t believe in the kids. I think some of the teachers did, because we had some quality teachers there who are still there today, but we didn’t have a big-picture mission.

Suppose that, through legislation (an artificial means) and through a government-run school voucher program (an artificially created market), public schools are privatized. "Natural evolution" will then take place: Schools will have to compete, only the best competitors will survive, and those schools that cannot compete will cease to exist. The surviving schools, by the Folk Theory of the Best Result, will be the best schools. It is an argument entirely based on two metaphors and a folk theory, all of which derive from Strict Father morality. Many people do not notice that Evolution Is Survival Of The Best Competitor is, indeed, a metaphor, much less a Strict Father metaphor. One way to reveal its metaphorical character is to contrast it with a metaphor for evolution that takes the perspective of Nurturant Parent morality: Evolution Is The Survival Of The Best Nurtured. Here "best nurtured" is taken to include both literal nurturing by parents and others and metaphorical nurturing by nature itself. Where fitting an ecological niche is being metaphorized as winning a competition in one case, it is metaphorized as being cared for by nature in the other. Both are metaphors for evolution, but they have very different entailments, especially when combined with the metaphor Natural Change Is Evolution and the folk theory that evolution yields the best result. Putting these together yields a very different composite metaphor for natural change, namely, Natural Change Is The Survival Of The Best Nurtured, which produces the best result. Applied to the issue of whether public schools should be privatized, this metaphor would entail that they should not be. Rather, public schools need to be "better nurtured," that is, given the resources they need to improve: better-trained and better-paid teachers, smaller classes, better facilities, programs for involving parents, community involvement, and so on.

parents are responsible for creating a context that allows their children to assume the identity of an academically successful student. Thus, we define stage setting as the process of (1) conveying the importance of education to children in a manner that leads schooling to become central to how they define themselves, and (2) creating and maintaining an environment (or life space) for them in which learning can be maximized or not compromised.

For instance, if a Black person is watching tv, instead of being bombarded by anti-Black images and messages hour after hour, they should be able to relax and be at peace in the knowledge that Black people control the media.  When their children go off to school in the morning, Black parents and other members of their community who provide love and support for their children, should be able to know that the teachers won’t be anti-Black and won’t fill their children’s heads with ideas that make them hate themselves or feel less worthy and less valuable.  The Black community should be confident that their children are being taught their history, their ideas (Black Thought), and are being told they are beautiful and good.  There shouldn’t be any worries about schoolmates of another race making their children feel inferior.  When they grow up and go to college, Black students should be confident that Black administrators and Black professors have created an environment and curriculum which encourages their entire educational development, not only providing skills for the workplace but nurturing their minds and their sense of community.  And when these students go out into the workplace, they should be confident that Black-controlled industries will be hiring them with Black managers in charge.  Racism will become a non-factor. Most significantly, when Black people have control over their community and have Black citizenship they won’t be forced to go through every day under the constant terror of being harassed, brutalized and killed by the police.  The psychological weight that would be lifted from them would be historic.  A new sense of energy and security could be channeled into self-affirmation and community-building.  I have little doubt that such a moment in history would lead to unprecedented strong race relations between citizens of this Black nation and whites in the current nation.  It’s almost impossible to have truly strong or positive race relations when one group is constantly required to bear the burden of oppression, and the other group feels the need to ignore or deny the existence of this oppression while also enforcing it.  The levels of tension and dishonesty are an enormous drain on everyone involved.  What a sweet and beautiful day it would be when Black people would simply not have to think about whites anymore.  In the same way that amerikans spend so little of our time thinking about Lithuanians or Norwegians.  And when you aren’t forced to think about someone, or forced to live the way they tell you to live, it’s a pleasure to get together and visit voluntarily.  Black people and Europeans on this continent (amerikans) would still talk to one another.  We might even still live in the same neighborhoods.  But the difference is that Black people would be their own people.  They would no longer be surrounded by the circle of whiteness.  The black dot on the white page: the exception to the rule.  White rule.  Black people would be a nation.  An entity unto themselves.  They would not be required to imagine themselves within the context of whiteness.  Their minds would be freed from the perpetual interpretation of every action and word (it seems even every thought) through whiteness.  Africans (Black people) would simply be Africans.  A people defined by their own terms, their identity neither within nor without the boundaries of whiteness.

I first met this young client when he was eight years old. He was very shy with a calm disposition. He had been diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder and his parents had hired a special tutor. His mother and father were already clients of mine, and his mother was very conscientious with his diet. She was most concerned about his extreme fatigue, how difficult it was to get him up in the morning, and how difficult it was for him to fall asleep. He was also falling asleep at school. In addition, she was concerned he was having difficulty remembering his schoolwork. With sensory processing disorder, children may have difficulty concentrating, planning and organizing, and responding appropriately to external stimuli. It is considered to be a learning disorder that fits into the autism spectrum of disorders. To target his diet and nutritional supplementation, I recommended a comprehensive blood panel, an adrenal profile, a food sensitivity panel, and an organic acids profile to determine vitamin, mineral, and energy deficiency status. His blood panel indicated low thyroid function, iron deficiency, and autoimmune thyroid. His adrenal profile indicated adrenal fatigue. His organic acids test indicated low B vitamins and zinc, low detoxification capacity, and low levels of energy nutrients, particularly magnesium. He was also low in omega-3 fatty acids and sensitive to gluten, dairy, eggs, and corn. Armed with all of that information, he and I worked together to develop a diet based on his test results. I like to involve children in the designing of their diet. That way they get to include the foods they like, learn how to make healthy substitutions for foods they love but can no longer eat, and learn how to improve their overall food choices. He also learned he needed to include protein at all meals, have snacks throughout the day, and what constitutes a healthy snack. I recommended he start with a gut restoration protocol along with iron support; food sensitivities often go hand in hand with leaky gut issues. This would also impact brain function. In the second phase of his program, I added inositol and serotonin support for sleep, thyroid support, DHA, glutathione support (to help regulate autoimmunity), a vitamin and mineral complex, fish oils, B-12, licorice extract for his adrenals, and dopamine and acetylcholine support to improve his concentration, energy, and memory. Within a month, his parents reported that he was falling asleep easily and would wake up with energy in the morning. His concentration improved, as did his ability to remember what he had learned at school. He started to play sports in the afternoon and took the initiative to let his mom know what foods not to include in his diet. He is still on his program three years later, and the improvements

Alternatives to time-out Isolating children for a period of time has become a popular discipline strategy advocated by many child psychologists and pediatricians. However, newly adopted toddlers seem to be more upset than helped by time-outs. Time-outs are intended to provide an opportunity for both parents and children to calm down and change their behaviors, but it isn’t effective for children who do not have self-calming strategies. Isolation can be traumatic for a toddler who is struggling with grief and/or attachment, and so perceives time-out as further rejection. If the child becomes angrier or more withdrawn as a result of being timed-out, try another strategy. One alternative is for parents to impose a brief time-out on themselves by temporarily withdrawing their attention from their child. For example, the parent whose child is throwing toys stops playing, looks away, and firmly tells the child, “I can’t continue playing until you stop throwing your toys.” Sitting passively next to the child may be effective, especially if the child previously was engaged in an enjoyable activity with the parent. Another alternative to parent enforced time-outs is self-determined time-outs, where the child is provided the opportunity to withdraw from a conflict voluntarily or at least have some input into the time-out arrangement. The parent could say, “I understand that you got very upset when you had to go to your room yesterday after you hit Sara. Can you think of a different place you would like to go to calm down if you feel like getting in a fight?” If the child suggests going out on the porch, the next time a battle seems to be brewing, Mom or Dad can say, “Do you need to go outside to the porch and calm down before we talk more?” Some children eventually reach the level of self-control where they remove themselves from a volatile situation without encouragement from Mom or Dad. These types of negotiations usually work better with older preschoolers or school-age children than they do with toddlers because of the reasoning skills involved. As an alternative to being timed-out, toddlers also can be timed-in while in the safety of a parent’s lap. Holding allows parents to talk to their child about why she’s being removed from an activity. For example, the toddler who has thrown her truck at the cat could be picked up and held for a few minutes while being told, “I can’t let you throw your toys at Misty. That hurts her, and in our family we don’t hurt animals. We’ll sit here together until you’re able to calm down.” Calming strategies could incorporate music, back rubs, or encouraging the child to breathe slowly. Objects that children are misusing should also be removed. For example, in the situation just discussed, the truck could be timed-out to a high shelf. If parents still decide to physically remove their child for a time-out, it should never be done in a way or place that frightens a toddler. Toddlers who have been frightened in the past by closed doors, dark rooms, or a particular room such as a bathroom should never be subjected to those settings. I know toddlers who, in their terror, have literally trashed the furniture and broken windows when they were locked in their rooms for a time-out. If parents feel a time-out is essential, it should be very brief, and in a location where the child can be supervised.

I HAVE WRITTEN LARGELY with reference to students spending an unreasonably long time in gaining an education; but I hope I shall not be misunderstood in regard to what is essential education. I do not mean that a superficial work should be done, that may be illustrated by the way in which some portions of the land are worked in Australia. The plow was put into the soil to the depth of only a few inches, the ground was not prepared for the seed, and the harvest was meager, corresponding to the superficial preparation that was given to the land. God has given inquiring minds to youth and children. Their reasoning powers are entrusted to them as precious talents. It is the duty of parents to keep the matter of their education before them in its true meaning: for it comprehends many lines. They should be used in the service of Christ for the uplifting of fallen humanity. Our schools are the Lord’s special instrumentality to fit up the children and the youth for missionary work. Parents should understand their responsibility, and help their children to appreciate the great blessings and privileges that God has provided for them in educational advantages. But their domestic education should keep pace with their education in literary lines. In childhood and youth, practical and literary training should be combined, and the mind stored with knowledge. Parents should feel that they have solemn work to do, and should take hold of it earnestly. They are to train and mold the characters of their children. They should not be satisfied with doing a surface work. Before every child is opened up a life involved with highest interests; for they are to be made complete in Christ through the instrumentalities which God has furnished. The soil in the heart should be preoccupied, the seeds of truth should be sown there in the earliest years. If parents are careless in this matter, they will be called to account for their unfaithful stewardship. Children should be dealt with tenderly and lovingly, and taught that Christ is {10} their personal Saviour, and that by the simple process of giving their hearts and minds to Him, they become His disciples.

As a black woman, I’d love to not have to talk about race ever again. I do not enjoy it. It is not fun. I dream of writing mystery novels one day. But I have to talk about race, because it is made an issue in the ways in which race is addressed or, more accurately, not addressed. When my employer enforces hairstyles in their dress code that ignore the very specific hairstyle needs of black women (see military restrictions against small braids, for example), then my employer is making race an issue in their attempts to ignore it. When my son’s school only has parent-teacher conferences during school hours, they are making race an issue by ignoring the fact that black and Latinx parents are more likely to work the type of hourly jobs that would cause them to lose much-needed pay, or even risk losing their employment altogether, in order to stay involved in their child’s education. When I take my kids to movies and none of the characters they see look like them, it’s the studio that is making it about race when they decide to make up entire universes in which no brown or black people exist. I just want to go to work, educate my kids, and enjoy a movie.

Principal Hansberry came to each of our classrooms that afternoon to talk to us about discipline and wasting food and respecting the cafeteria workers. I was really worried that Danny would be suspended for starting the food fight. He’d only been helping me. If he got in trouble, I’d have to come clean and take his punishment instead. But the principal had decided that this was “first-week high spirits.” Instead of singling out anyone for punishment, she made the whole school use the last hour of the day to help clean up the cafeteria. That was the first time we’d been punished like that for a food fight. We all got to see what a huge gross mess we had left behind. Lots of kids complained that they hadn’t thrown any food, but Principal Hansberry said that since making the mess was a “group effort,” cleaning it up should be, too. Plus we all had to write a note to take home that said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I am sorry if I have ketchup or anything on my clothes today. We were involved in a food fight at lunch, and we feel very bad for causing so much trouble. Please accept my apology for the extra laundry.” Personally, I thought this was kind of a funny note. But we had to bring it back signed by our parents, so a lot of people didn’t think it was so funny. Luckily they weren’t mad at me or Danny, though. Except for Avery. He tried to get Danny in trouble by telling Principal Hansberry who’d started the fight. But she told him that wasn’t necessary. She said everyone was “responsible for the mob mentality we saw here today,” whatever that means. The most amazing part was that nobody said anything about Merlin. I guess a lot of people didn’t see him. But even the ones who did didn’t admit it. Vice Principal Taney came into our class and asked: “Did anyone here see a dog in the cafeteria before or during the food fight?” No one raised their hands. After a minute, Heidi said: “Maybe you imagined it, Mr. Taney,” in this really innocent voice. I was worried that Avery would tell, but later Hugo told me that nobody in Mr. Guare’s class answered Mr. Taney’s question either. I don’t know why Avery didn’t say anything. Maybe he already knew everyone was mad at him for snitching on Danny.

Pedagogical neglect means that the parents show no interest in school achievements or in the child's interests or activities. Educational abuse means that the child has not been able to make their own education and / or career choice.

It’’s very hard to know who is going to commit an act of violence. But... prevention does not require prediction. It does require, however, that we increase overall access to brain health interventions. ... A... tiered system is already working in some schools. At the tier-one level, everyone should have access to brain health screenings and first aid, to conflict resolution programs, and to suicide prevention education. Peer intervention programs teach kids to seek help from trained adults for friends they’re worried about without fear of repercussion. A second tier of attention is trained on kids going through a hard time—a student grieving a lost parent, one who has suffered teasing or bullying, or those in known high-risk populations. For instance, gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender kids are at disproportionate risk for bullying, so special efforts might be made to connect those kids to resources. The third level of intervention comes into play when a child has emerged as a particular concern. Perhaps he or she has an ongoing emotional disorder, has talked about suicide, or—as Dylan did— has turned in a paper with violent or disturbing subject matter. The student is then referred to a team of specially trained teachers and other professionals who will interview him or her, look at the student's social media and other evidence, and speak to friends, parents, local law enforcement, counselors, and teachers. The real beauty of these measures is not that they catch potential school shooters, but how effectively they help schools to identify teens struggling with all different kinds of issues: bullying, eating disorders, cutting, undiagnosed learning disorders, addiction, abuse at home, and partner violence — just to name a few. In rare cases, a team may discover that the student has made a concrete plan to hurt himself or others, at which point law enforcement may become involved. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, though, simply getting a kid help is enough.

What actually happened was this. Over the last twenty years, we have delighted in our children, and have had many of them. We don’t shuttle them off to day care or leave them with professional care providers. And we homeschool them or have them in schools which encourage direct parental involvement. Our families are tight. We have had many children because we love them, despite hostile stares or comments from those outside our community. To quote a comment made to my wife on the street years ago, “My, you don’t believe in the pill, do you?” But we didn’t mind—kids are a kick. And, as I can now say, grandkids are a kick. It just keeps getting better. But then one day, we were distracted from our work by all this yelling that was coming from the general direction of the Moscow School District. “Where have the kids gone!? How could this have happened? Maybe they moved out of the state!” And the powers that be put lighter fluid in their hair, set it ablaze, and ran in tight little circles. “Where are the kids?” You see the state takes away money for each little breathing bipedal carbon unit that doesn’t show up in the classroom each autumn, and it turns out this is serious business. So, against my better judgment, I say something like this: “Um—maybe you don’t have kids in your schools because you quit having them. And if any actually make it into the womb, you think it should be legal to get them out of there violently. Talk about eviction. And if any of successfully run that gauntlet and actually show up, you provide them with a fifth-rate education and then turn them loose into your hollow and ugly world. And maybe you don’t have access to our kids anymore because we looked at all this and quit handing them to you to educate. Just a thought.” Take care not to get the whole thing turned around. Susan’s sign-off—“breeding my way to a better tomorrow” reminds me of a joke that can be reapplied to our situation. Early in the twentieth century, a refined woman from Boston was at a high brow social gathering where she met a woman from Chicago, who didn’t quite fit with the refined lady’s ideas of deportment. “Here in Boston,” the great lady said with a sniff, “we think breeding is everything.” “Well,” the other lady said, “out in Chicago we think it is a lot of fun, but we don’t think it’s everything.

African Americans have even less mobility. For those born to parents in the bottom income quintile, over half (53 percent) remain there as adults, and only a quarter (26 percent) make it to the middle quintile or higher. Considering the disadvantages that low-income African Americans have had as a result of segregation - poor access to jobs and to schools where they can excel - it’s surprising that their mobility, compared to that of other Americans, isn’t even lower. Two explanations come to mind. One is that many African Americans heed the warning that they have to be twice as good to succeed and exhibit more than average hard work, responsibility, and ambition to supplement a little luck. The other is that our affirmative action programs have been moderately successful. Probably some of both are involved.

Finally, we see that narcissistic students are now coequal drivers with their professors when it comes to rapidly evolving victim theory. By one count, there are now 117 categories of gender identity, many of those developed by students struggling to find some last way to be transgressive in an environment where their every self-involved claim of victimhood is met with tender attention and apologies from the campus diversity bureaucracy. How those 117 categories will play out for public policy remains to be seen. The ultimate agenda here, however, is to destroy any last shred of female modesty that might stand in the way of the total normalization of casual promiscuity, in obedience to the sexual-liberation movement of the 1960s. Many girls are embarrassed to be seen naked by other girls. Now, however, they are being told to swallow their inhibitions if a boy is in their bathroom or locker room. This can be achieved only by adopting a stance of utter indifference to the powerful, primal taboos around nakedness and sex—in other words, to adopt the sad sexual crudeness of the stars of Sex and the City or of Lena Dunham. And according to progressive elites, any parent or school official who disagrees is standing in the way of moral progress. One shrinks to contemplate what the academy is cooking up next.

Japanese tragedy illustrates this aspect of the Trinity better than Greek tragedy, Kitamori taught, because it is based on the feeling expressed by the word tsurasa. This is the peculiar pain felt when someone dies in behalf of another. yet the term implies neither bitterness nor sadness. Nor is tsurasa burdened with the dialectical tension in the struggle with fate that is emphasized in Greek drama, since dialectic is a concept foreign to Japan. Tsurasa is pain with resignation and acceptance. Kitamori called our attention to a Kabuki play, The Village School. The feudal lord of a retainer named Matsuo is defeated in battle and forced into exile. Matsuo feigns allegiance to the victor but remains loyal to his vanquished lord. When he learns that his lord's son and heir, Kan Shusai, has been traced to a village school and marked for execution, Matsuo resolves to save the boy's life. The only way to do this, he realizes, is to substitute a look-alike who can pass for Kan Shusai and be mistakenly killed in his place. Only one substitute will likely pass: Matsuo's own son. So when the enemy lord orders the schoolmaster to produce the head of Kan Shusai, Matsuo's son consents to be beheaded instead. The plot succeeds: the enemy is convinced that the proffered head is that of Kan Shusai. Afterwards, in a deeply emotional scene, the schoolmaster tells Matsuo and his wife that their son died like a true samurai to save the life of the other boy. The parents burst into tears of tsurasa. 'Rejoice my dear,' Matsuo says consolingly to his wife. 'Our son has been of service to our lord.' Tsurasa is also expressed in a Noh drama, The Valley Rite. A fatherless boy named Matsuwaka is befriended by the leader of a band of ascetics, who invites him to accompany the band on a pilgrimage up a sacred mountain. On the way, tragically, Matsuwaka falls ill. According to an ancient and inflexible rule of the ascetics, anyone who falls ill on a pilgrimage must be put to death. The band's leader is stricken with sorrow; he cannot bear to sacrifice the boy he has come to love as his own son. He wishes that 'he could die and the boy live.' But the ascetics follow the rule. They hurl the boy into a ravine, then fling stones and clods of dirt to bury him. The distressed leader then asks to be thrown into the ravine after the boy. His plea so moves the ascetics that they pray for Matsuwaka to be restored to life. Their prayer is answered, and mourning turns to celebration. So it was with God's sacrifice of his Son. The Son's obedience to the Father, the Father's pain in the suffering and death of the Son, the Father's joy in the resurrection - these expressions of a deep personal relationship enrich our understanding of the triune God. Indeed, the God of dynamic relationships within himself is also involved with us his creatures. No impassive God, he interacts with the society of persons he has made in his own image. He expresses his love to us. He shares in our joys and sorrows. This is true of the Holy Spirit as well as the Father and Son... Unity, mystery, relationship - these are the principles of Noh that inform our understanding of the on God as Father, Son, and Spirit; or as Parent, Child, and Spirit; or as Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier...this amazing doctrine inspires warm adoration, not cold analysis. It calls for doxology, not definition.

Mid May 2012 Andy wrote in his Email reply: Dear Young, You are still the boy I grew to love and cherish forty-four years ago. The lyrics you sent, to “The Things You Are To Me” brought back many fond memories of our time together. You, young man, do have a way with words. In more ways than one, you always touched the core of my heart with your innocence and childlike approach to life. Walter is a lucky man to have you in his life. I wish I were in his shoes, you little ‘faerie’ boy, stirring up an emotional storm within me which I had kept hidden for so long. Now that our parents are deceased, we can be free from the emotional baggage imposed upon us. You had mentioned briefly that you are writing your memoirs. I hope you are not revealing anything that we pledged to never reveal. My advice to you is to stay clear of those subjects. It is not advisable to tamper with the school or the Society, especially when you swore an oath, a gentlemanly honor of confidentiality to never reveal any of our membership secrets. If the word gets out, the paparazzi will have a field day digging for whatever dirt they can find. I hate to see you being sued by any parties involved. I’m speaking to you as a trusted friend, confidant, and ex- lover. Tread with caution, Young! You are old enough to decide for yourself. I’m sure you don’t need your ex-Valet to tell you what to do. Please send my regards to Walter and maybe we’ll have a chance to meet one day, soon. Let’s continue our regular correspondence. My love always! Andy.

A third positive result even further from the traditional tool kit of financial incentives comes from a recent randomized control trial conducted in the U.K., using the increasingly popular and low-cost method of text reminders. This intervention involved sending texts to half the parents in some school in advance of a major math test to let them know that their child had a test coming up in five days, then in three days, then in one day. The researchers call this approach “pre-informing.” The other half of parents did not receive the texts. The pre-informing texts increased student performance on the math test by the equivalent of one additional month of schooling, and students in the bottom quartile benefited most. These children gained the equivalent of two additional months of schooling, relative to the control group. Afterward, both parents and students said they wanted to stick with the program, showing that they appreciated being nudged.

It’s not hard to find evidence that can be used to back up a parent’s decision to never let their kid venture out unsupervised (a viral story of a child lured away from a skating rink, a forced abduction from a park, a memory of a missing child from the parent’s own elementary school days). I empathize with the feelings of horror those stories evoke. To feel this way is natural. But what do we do with those feelings? I don’t think we should use them to make our safety decisions for us. I’d encourage parents to look at the data and probability of crimes involving tweens and young teens. Some will say, “Probability doesn’t matter. If it happens one time, to my child, that’s all that matters. It’s my job to protect against the possibility of danger, no matter how small.” My response to that is simple: You can’t even try to keep your child safe from random acts of tragedy.

When your tween begins to isolate from you, especially in public, you may feel rejected or embarrassed, but nothing rivals the stigma of a parent who is labeled too permissive about their kid being unsupervised in public. “To each his own, but I’d never let my kid go to the mall alone. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened.” This is a strange sort of brag that implies the parent who lets their kid explore public spaces independently a) doesn’t understand the risks involved, b) understands the risks but willfully ignores them, or c) would somehow be inhumanly okay if a tragedy befell their child. I understand and relate to being afraid of what might happen when your kid starts navigating the world without you. I’ve had all the same horrible fantasies as the next parent. But it’s not only unfair, it’s also cruel to blame parents for the terrible things that can happen, at random, to anyone.

If we haven’t travelled, if we don’t yet know what we want, if we have a hard time staying with anyone for a while or remaining friendly with them when we part, if we like to be admired a lot, if our real passions lie at the office, if the purpose of our life is to be famous, if we don’t especially like to listen, if we have trouble being calm, if we have been very badly scrambled by our own parents, then we might consider whether – in fairness to everyone involved – this is really for us.

It slowly dawned on her that many of the behaviors of both students and parents that she found off-putting were expressions of white privilege. “I feel like there’s a way in which we upper-middle-class parents…want [our kids] to be unencumbered in their lives,” including, she feels, by rules. “It’s this entitlement. And it’s this feeling of…is there a rule? I don’t need to respect this rule. It doesn’t pertain to me.” By her children’s third year in the school, Ali realized, “ ‘I just can’t do this. This is not me.’ It just—I felt kind of disgusted by the culture.” It was everywhere, and yet she didn’t have a name for it until she became involved in an affinity group for parents choosing integrated schools. “The competitiveness, complete with humble bragging. The insularity and superficiality, the focus on ‘me and my kid only,

When the children of emotionally immature parents grow up, the core emptiness remains, even if they have a superficially normal adult life. Their loneliness can continue into adulthood if they unwittingly choose relationships that can’t give them enough emotional connection. They may go to school, work, marry, and raise children, but all the while they’ll still be haunted by that core sense of emotional isolation.

The ideal position of play in life was first explored by the Ancient Greeks. Among all their gods, two mattered to them especially. The first was Apollo, god of reason and wisdom. He was concerned with patience, thoroughness, duty and logical thinking. He presided over aspects of government, commerce and what we would now call science. But there was another important god, a diametrically opposed figure whom the Greeks called Dionysus. He was concerned with the imagination, impatience, chaos, emotion, instinct – and play. The ‘Dionysian’ involved dreams, liberation and a relaxation of the strict rules of reason. Importantly, the Greeks did not think that any life could be complete without a combination of these two figures. Both Apollo and Dionysus had their claims on human lives, and each could breed dangerously unbalanced minds if they held undiluted sway.

Sheep and Goats One way of independently checking the results suggested by the hypnosis studies is to examine another form of suggestion, one that is in some ways stronger than conventional hypnotic induction. These are the subtle suggestions induced in us by our culture, our personal experiences, and the beliefs we learned from parents and schools. Together, culture, experience, and beliefs are potent shapers of our sense of reality. They are, in effect, hidden persuaders, powerful reinforcers of our sense of what is real. Our deep beliefs determine what we view as logically reasonable and what we consider to be morally and ethically self-evident. As we’ll explore in more detail in chapter 14, the hidden “hypnosis” of belief actually determines to a greater degree than is commonly known what we can consciously perceive. The hypnosis experiments showed that a slight tweaking of these beliefs resulted in a different performance. Thus, we would expect that people who accept the existence of ESP—for reasons of culture, experience, or belief—will score higher, on average, than people who do not. This turns out to be one of the most consistent experimental effects in psi research. It was whimsically dubbed the “sheep-goat” effect by psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler, who in 1943 proposed that one reason that confirmed skeptics do not report psi experiences is because they subconsciously avoid them.37 People who do report such experiences Schmeidler called the “sheep,” and the skeptics she called the “goats.” These studies typically had people fill in a questionnaire asking about their degree of belief in ESP and about any psi experiences they may have had. On the basis of their responses, participants were classified as either sheep or goats. All participants then took a standardized psi test, like an ESP card test, after which the results of the sheep and goats were compared. The idea was that the performance of the sheep would be significantly better than that of the goats. In 1993, psychologist Tony Lawrence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, reported a meta-analysis of all sheep-goat forced-choice experiments conducted between 1943 and 1993. Lawrence found seventy-three published reports by thirty-seven different investigators, involving more than 685,000 guesses produced by forty-five hundred participants. The overall results were strongly in favor of the sheep-goat effect, with believers performing better than disbelievers with odds greater than a trillion to one.

Enroll in the Best Hebrew School Atlanta for a Rich Cultural Experience Welcome to Hebrew School Atlanta, where they give a transforming educational path that celebrates Jewish heritage while also providing a rich cultural experience. Their school is committed to instilling a love of the Hebrew language, Jewish traditions, and values in each student while also encouraging individual growth and development. They think that education is about more than just learning; it is about developing a meaningful connection to one's heritage and community. They try to establish an inclusive and supportive environment in which students can explore their Jewish identity, develop a strong sense of belonging, and form lifelong connections. Their school is more than simply a place to learn; it's a thriving community that welcomes families from all walks of life. 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.

The dangerous aspect of having emotional immature parents is that the child keeps growing lonely until they are adults and when it’s time to choose a relationship or life partner, they now realize they don’t need any emotional connection. Such children will do normal things every other child with happy childhood do; they work among people, go to school with other people, marry and also raise children. But, have you ever wondered how such a child wants to raise psychologically well kids? Well, keep reading; this chapter will look deeper into what emotional maturity is all about and its adverse effect.

relations.50 The idea of collective child-rearing was not unique to kibbutzim. It has been periodically attempted as a desired social disruption since antiquity. Plato believed that raising children communally would result in children treating all men as their fathers and thus more respectfully.51 Communist societies have also been associated with collective child-rearing; the family is seen as a threat to state ideology because it fosters a sense of belonging to a family unit, and totalitarian ideology requires that family allegiance be subordinated to allegiance to the party or state. Liberal political theory has also struggled with the issue of the family being an obstacle to an egalitarian society (for example, because child care and family life generally impose greater constraints on women).52 But attempts to fundamentally restructure or minimize the bond between parent and child have very rarely, if ever, endured.53 While mild forms of collective child-rearing are found in cultures all around the world (and in some other mammalian species, as we will see in chapter 7), they typically involve forms of alloparental care, whereby relatives share child-care duties. Dormitory sleeping arrangements for infants (of the kind initially attempted by the kibbutzim) are extremely rare. A 1971 survey of 183 societies around the world found that none maintained such a system.54 As in many utopian communities, the organization of child-rearing was motivated largely by adult imperatives. If men and women were to be treated truly equally, collective parenting might be seen as an obvious structural necessity, regardless of its implications for individual children and their development. Historian Steven Mintz noted in Huck’s Raft, his sweeping work on American childhood, that almost every innovation in child welfare in the United States, including orphanages and subsidized child care, has been driven primarily by adult concerns. Of secondary importance were philosophical and pragmatic convictions about what was best for children.55 As radical as communes may be in some key respects, they generally play by adult rules in regard to children, whose needs and concerns have never been, as far as I can tell, the primary motivation for any utopian community (even though some of them had amazing schools and treated children kindly). Setting up utopias seems to be like sex in at least one way: it is oriented to adult satisfaction.

We can imagine ourselves as a series of concentric circles. On the outside lie all the more obvious things about us: what we do for a living, our age, education, tastes in food and broad social background. We can usually find plenty of people who recognize us at this level. But deeper in are the circles that contain our more intimate selves, involving feelings about parents, secret fears, daydreams, ambitions that might never be realized, the stranger recesses of our sexual imagination and all that we find beautiful and moving.

several core factors exist that can explain the phenomenon. In short, these factors are the presence of a multi-age group, exposure or lack thereof to the overload of social activity at school, the possibility of encountering a wide variety of populations, the manner and extent of parental involvement and discourse with adults, as well as the extent of community involvement of homeschooled children.

My stuttering surfaced midway through third grade in my second year in Brazil, Indiana. By the time I was in fifth, I couldn’t say three words without stammering. It was especially bad around grown-ups and strangers and at its absolute worst when public speaking was involved. I’ll never forget the school play. Everyone knew I stuttered, but since participation was mandatory, my teacher mercifully assigned me a role with just one line. I practiced it at home a hundred times. Sometimes, I’d stumble. Usually, it came out smooth and wrinkle-free, but under those stage lights, I locked up. The silence was intolerable. There were fifteen, twenty people in attendance at most, all of them were parents, and you couldn’t ask for a more supportive audience. Everyone waited patiently, almost willing me to speak. A few of my classmates snickered, but most were rooting for me. My teacher watched with wide, sensitive eyes as my lower lip trembled. I knew it was hopeless, so I turned and left the stage without even trying.

The community joined forces and made an investment in a shared goal, acknowledging their strong connection with the recipient of the resources, rather than simply offering charity. The community's composition remained relatively stable over an extended period, with few outsiders joining. This provided the "investors" with confidence that, even if not themselves, their future generations would reap the benefits. The first schools I attended, until standard 7, were constructed mostly through the efforts of the community the school serviced. After the Bantu Education Act was implemented in 1953, education for people in the homelands was financed through direct taxes paid by residents of the homelands, instead of general state spending. When there was a class short, the parents would pool their resources and build it

I used to firmly believe that prestigious schools, which encompasses both private schools and top-tier quantile 5 public schools with impressive graduation rates, held a clear advantage over lower-quality no fee public schools. That was, until Dr Thomas Sowell introduced me to the sorting function of the formal schooling system and the unfair advantage prestigious schools have since they can pick and choose who they admit. From the outset they can choose to admit students of a certain intellect thus increasing the chances of these students performing favourably relative to no fee public schools that have an obligation to admit everyone. Parents who can afford to send their child to private school are usually more involved and provide more resources for their child to succeed. The ability of parents to afford the prohibitively high costs of the schools is also an indicator of the child’s abilities since his parents had it in them to work hard enough to earn what enabled to afford a prestigious school. Once you have factored those aspects as a minimum, the prestigious school’s performance doesn’t seem that great. As long as the parents have resources to support the child’s learning environment, the type of school a child attends becomes less relevant. This is why the quantile 5 public schools perform at the level of private schools. As the level of the parent’s material wealth increases such that more educational resources can be availed to the child, so does the performance of a child. This, off course happens to a certain level as the law of diminishing return eventually kicks in.

Sazi is fortunate to be born of parents that are comparable enough to be able to see the impact of both nature and nurture. Even better is that no longer can allegations about women’s progress in life be attributed to society and ‘the patriarchy’ holding them back. Since 1994 there has been a concerted focus on directing taxpayer-funded programs to the upliftment of women; from educational programs at school, admission and funding of tertiary programs for women to employment and business funding that explicitly exclude boys and men. This ought to mean comparable men and women ought to achieve the same outcomes since there are essentially no differences between men and women. Lawmakers have implemented programs aimed at empowering and uplifting girls and women. These initiatives have actively sought to address the claimed long-standing societal and patriarchal barriers that have hindered their progress. So based on this, the difference in the sex of parents no longer favours men thus making comparing outcomes possible.

It is a reason why so many who seek holiness or spiritual improvement impose on themselves a strict austerity. And it is why schools and colleges used to emulate the ways of monasteries. The first Christian hermits and monastics who practiced extreme austerity in the desert saw themselves as emulating Jesus during his sojourn in the wilderness. Once monastic life became institutionalized, removing oneself from carnal temptation was a major reason why religiously minded individuals would choose to take vows. The Rule of St. Benedict, set down around the year 530, included commitments to poverty, humility, chastity, and obedience, and this became the paradigm for most Christian monastic orders. The vow of poverty generally involved renouncing all individual property, although the monastic community was allowed to hold property, and of course some monasteries eventually became quite wealthy. But the lifestyle of most monks in the Middle Ages was kept deliberately austere. Here is how Aelred of Rievaulx, writing in the twelfth century, describes it: Our food is scanty, our garments rough, our drink is from the streams and our sleep upon our book. Under our tired limbs there is a hard mat; when sleep is sweetest we must rise at a bell’s bidding. . . . self-will has no scope; there is no moment for idleness or dissipation.4 Strict precautions to eliminate the possibility of sexual encounters, regular searches of dormitories to ensure that no one was hoarding personal property, a rigid and arduous daily routine to occupy to the full one’s physical and mental energy: by means of this sort monasteries and convents did their best to provide a temptation-free environment. More than a trace of the same thinking lay behind the preference for isolated rural locations among those who sought to establish colleges in nineteenth-century America. Sometimes the argument might be conveyed subtly by a brochure picturing the college surrounded by nothing but fields, woods, and hills, an image that also appealed to the deeply rooted idea that the land was a source of virtue.5 But it was also put forward explicitly. The town of North Yarmouth sought to persuade the founders of Bowdoin College of its advantageous location by pointing out that it was “not so much exposed to many Temptations to Dissipation, Extravagance, Vanity and Various Vices as great seaport towns frequently are.”6 And the 1847 catalog of Tusculum College, Tennessee, noted that its rural situation “guards it from all the ensnaring and demoralizing influences of a town.”7 Needless to say, reassurances of this sort were directed more at the fee-paying parents than at the prospective students. One should also add that not everyone took such a positive view of the rural campus. Some complained that life far away from urban civilization fostered vulgarity, depravity, licentiousness, and hy

However, when he has issues with being bullied at school, they write it off as a typical childhood experience. Since Ross is doing well academically and is still involved in after-school activities, they do not bother to validate his emotions. Consequently, Ross constantly feels alone and comes to subconsciously believe the only person he can rely on to soothe himself is himself. As you can see, emotional neglect does not necessarily mean a child was physically abandoned—it can include a wider variety of neglect such as absenteeism or a lack of emotional connection between the caregiver and child. Moreover, a Dismissive-Avoidant attachment style can also be formed through a combination of emotional neglect from one parent and enmeshment trauma from the other. According to Thrivetalk, enmeshment trauma is a form of emotional damage that occurs when one or more parents project their values, needs, and dreams onto their child. This causes the child to abandon their own sense of self in order to please their caregiver. Ultimately, the child feels as though they must adapt to their parent’s needs to be worthy of love, and this, when combined with a caregiver who is also unavailable, leaves the child feeling emotionally abandoned. Eventually, the Dismissive-Avoidant wants to dissociate from those around them because they have an abundance of stored subconscious associations around their emotional vulnerability being rejected. In adulthood, they will subconsciously feel in control when they are on their own, and will be at peace alone. In their relationships, they will need time alone to soothe themselves because being alone has the most positive childhood associations. Since the subconscious is most “comfortable” with what it knows, it will actively work to re-create a sense of familiarity. For the Dismissive-Avoidant, this means withdrawing in emotionally challenging situations in adulthood. For those who are in a relationship with the Dismissive-Avoidant, or if you are a Dismissive-Avoidant yourself, issues can arise if this coping mechanism is not mutually understood. Therefore, to begin healing yourself or your relationship, you must first understand where these patterns come from, and then learn the steps to finally heal them.

Influential educational school in Abu Dhabi: Reach British School Selecting schools that speak about the type of education you want to impart to your kid is an important decision. Like all other difficult decisions that parenthood brings with it, this one too cannot be decided based on one impulsive thought. School is an important part of any child's growth. They learn, they giggle, and grow into beautiful individuals. Thus, schools build them into responsible beings. However, finding the right school can be research-heavy and hectic. International education in the United Arab Emirates is not cheap, and this adds to an extra load of pressure on deciding parents. Yet, Abu Dhabi is known to host an excellent range of international schools that are somewhat budget-friendly. The British International School is one such example, they surely secure a place in the list of best schools in Abu Dhabi. Why choose Reach British School? Reading through different curriculums, and googling into millions of school websites is a part of this decision-making. You look for that spark, one that you look for in any relationship. Yes, choosing a school is the beginning of a life-long relationship, an important part of your child’s life. This article will push you towards decision making, as it lists the points on why you should choose Reach British School. The following reasons will convince you that it fits into the best schools in Abu Dhabi. English proficiency The staff is filled with native English-speaking teachers. Thus, they bring with them, years of experience in the language field and absolute English proficiency. Being native English speakers, they can showcase experience in the UK or other international schools. Excellent facilities Schooling is a part of a child's overall growth, and there is more to it than just academics. Being one of the best schools in Abu Dhabi, they support an exciting curriculum. It includes sports, arts, academic subjects, and a bunch of other extra-curricular activities. High Academic standards and behavioral expectations A child grows into a successful human being, who is also a responsible citizen. Thus, the school sets a strong focus on the academic depth and the behavioral patterns of the child. They ensure that your child reaches their fullest potential in a safe and secure environment. Student progress tracking You will get a chance to be deeply involved in your child's progress. The school will provide regular reports on your child's growth that will give you a fair idea about their needs, likes, and dislikes. Thus, you can take an active part in their academic progress, social and emotional well-being. Secondary scholarships The school funds a scholarship program to motivate students to achieve their dreams. The program attracts bright minds and pushes them to reach their potential in the fields they are passionate about. Amazing learning Not just the staff, but also the environment of the school will enable your child to go through an amazing learning experience. Your child will be motivated and encouraged to perform better as that is the base for amazing learning. Endnotes Reach British School wants to let your child shine, in the truest sense possible. Keeping the tag of being one of the best schools in Abu Dhabi, is difficult. Thus, they aspire to be better every day and sculpt new souls into responsible adults, while protecting their innocence and childhood.

succeed. Despite a lack of evidence, the self-esteem movement took hold in the United States in a way that it did not in most of the world. So, it was understandable that PTA parents focused their energies on the nonacademic side of their children’s school. They dutifully sold cupcakes at the bake sales and helped coach the soccer teams. They doled out praise and trophies at a rate unmatched in other countries. They were their kids’ boosters, their number-one fans. These were the parents that Kim’s principal in Oklahoma praised as highly involved. And PTA parents certainly contributed to the school’s culture, budget, and sense of community. However, there was not much evidence that PTA parents helped their children become critical thinkers. In

As you search for a world-class school, ask parents at each place to talk about the school’s weaknesses. Listen carefully. If parents say they are very involved in the school, ask them how.

The other article was by Lois Weiner, a professor who prepared urban teachers at New Jersey City University. Weiner was a parent activist at P.S. 3 in District 2, which she described as a highly progressive alternative school with an unusual degree of parent involvement. She claims that district administrators were stifling teachers and parents at P.S.3 by mandating "constructivist" materials and specific instructional strategies ... She [Weiner] continued, "The degree of micromanagement is astounding." Those who challenged the district office's mandates, she said, risked getting an unsatisfactory rating or being fired. Weiner contended that "opposition from parents is building against the new math curriculum," which was supposed to be field-tested with control groups, but instead was mandated for every classroom." Teachers were expressly prohibited from using other math textbooks or materials, and some were clandestinely "photocopying pages of now-banned workbooks.

The notion of sharing attention and time is the most difficult for young children… involve your child as much as possible and activities that do not center around him. When a classmate is absent from school for an extended period of time, have your only child call to find out how he is feeling and send a get well card. Have your child offer to bring his assignments home to him or to call him each day after school to keep the homebound student up to date.

Stuffed animals or blankies can be helpful for kids who struggle with separating, because they literally travel with them between the home and school environments, thereby acting as a link between the two. Your child might want to have a laminated picture of the family (feel free to use clear packing tape!), and you can use this in your separation routine, reminding your child that after you leave, they can look at this picture and say over and over, “My family is near. My family is near.” Consider involving your child in a transitional object choice: “Is there anything you want to bring to school to remind you of home?

When we first went to Provence, I assumed I would be observing a different culture. With attachment in mind, it became obvious to me that it is much more than a different culture — I was witnessing a culture at work and a culture that worked. Children greeted adults and adults greeted children. Socializing involved whole families, not adults with adults and children with children. There was only one village activity at a time, so families were not pulled in several directions. Sunday afternoon was for family walks in the countryside. Even at the village fountain, the local hangout, teens mixed with seniors. Festivals and celebrations, of which there were many, were all family affairs. The music and dancing brought the generations together instead of separating them. Culture took precedence over materialism. One could not even buy a baguette without first engaging in the appropriate greeting rituals. Village stores were closed for three hours at midday while schools emptied and families reconvened. Lunch was eaten in a congenial manner as multigenerational groupings sat around tables, sharing conversation and a meal. The attachment customs around the village primary school were equally impressive. Children were personally escorted to school and picked up by their parents or grandparents. The school was gated and the grounds could be entered only by a single entrance. At the gate were the teachers, waiting for their students to be handed over to them. Again, culture dictated that connection be established with appropriate greetings between the adult escorts and the teachers as well as the teachers and the students. Sometimes when the class had been collected but the school bell had not yet rung, the teacher would lead the class through the playground, like a mother goose followed by her goslings. While to North American eyes this may appear to be a preschool ritual, even absurd, in Provence it was selfevidently part of the natural order of things. When children were released from school, it was always one class at a time, the teacher in the lead. The teacher would wait with the students at the gate until all had been collected by their adult escort. Their teachers were their teachers whether on the grounds or in the village market or at the village festival. There weren't many cracks to fall through. Provençal culture was keeping attachment voids to a minimum.

I received an urgent e-mail from a high school student named Makenzie Hatfield of Charleston, West Virginia. She informed me of a group of parents who were attempting to suppress the teaching of two of my novels, The Prince of Tides and Beach Music. I heard rumors of this controversy as I was completing my latest filthy, vomit-inducing work. These controversies are so commonplace in my life that I no longer get involved. But my knowledge of mountain lore is strong enough to know the dangers of refusing to help a Hatfield of West Virginia. I also do not mess with McCoys.

A physical education expert, asked to visit a grade school in East Orange, is astonished to be told that jump ropes are in short supply and that the children therefore have to jump “in groups.” Basketball courts, however, “are in abundance” in these schools, the visitor says, because the game involves little expense. Defendants in a recent suit brought by the parents of schoolchildren in New Jersey’s poorest districts claimed that differences like these, far from being offensive, should be honored as the consequence of “local choice”—the inference being that local choice in urban schools elects to let black children gravitate to basketball. But this “choice”—which feeds one of the most intransigent myths about black teen-age boys—is determined by the lack of other choices. Children in East Orange cannot choose to play lacrosse or soccer, or to practice modern dance, on fields or in dance studios they do not have; nor can they keep their bodies clean in showers that their schools cannot afford. Little children in East Orange do not choose to wait for 15 minutes for a chance to hold a jump rope.

East Side High became well known some years ago when its former principal, a colorful and controversial figure named Joe Clark, was given special praise by U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. Bennett called the school “a mecca of education” and paid tribute to Joe Clark for throwing out 300 students who were thought to be involved with violence or drugs. “He was a perfect hero,” says a school official who has dinner with me the next evening, “for an age in which the ethos was to cut down on the carrots and increase the sticks. The day that Bennett made his visit, Clark came out and walked the hallways with a bullhorn and a bat. If you didn’t know he was a principal, you would have thought he was the warden of a jail. Bennett created Joe Clark as a hero for white people. He was on the cover of Time magazine. Parents and kids were held in thrall after the president endorsed him. “In certain respects, this set a pattern for the national agenda. Find black principals who don’t identify with civil rights concerns but are prepared to whip black children into line. Throw out the kids who cause you trouble. It’s an easy way to raise the average scores. Where do you put these kids once they’re expelled? You build more prisons. Two thirds of the kids that Clark threw out are in Passaic County Jail. “This is a very popular approach in the United States today. Don’t provide the kids with a new building. Don’t provide them with more teachers or more books or more computers. Don’t even breathe a whisper of desegregation. Keep them in confinement so they can’t subvert the education of the suburbs. Don’t permit them ‘frills’ like art or poetry or theater. Carry a bat and tell them they’re no good if they can’t pass the state exam. Then, when they are ruined, throw them into prison. Will it surprise you to be told that Paterson destroyed a library because it needed space to build a jail?

Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia discovered a database of very poor twins. All the earlier twin studies involved middle-class children. It turns out that IQ is far more heritable for rich children than for poor children. In fact, for poor children the effect of genes on IQ almost disappears—there is little correlation between how smart parents are and how smart their children are, and identical twins’ IQ is no more similar than that of fraternal twins. So it seems that poor children’s IQ is less affected by their genes than rich children’s IQ. But how can that be? Surely poverty can’t change your DNA? The answer is that small variations in a poor child’s environment—going to a better or worse school, for example—make a big difference to their IQ. Those differences swamp any genetic differences. Rich children are generally already going to good schools, so the differences between them are more likely to reflect genetic variation. Notoriously, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their book The Bell Curve suggested that the heritability of IQ meant that programs such as Head Start were futile. But, in fact, the new heritability results lead to just the opposite conclusion: changing a poor child’s environment can have enormous effects.

means seeing how changes such as these fit into the big picture, too. Are all staff members and, indeed, students engaged in developing the vision and mission of the school? Do leaders constantly explain how specific changes or team tasks fit into this larger vision? Can teachers and students articulate that connection as well? When asked what kind of school they are involved with, will you get the same sort of answer from teachers, students, bus drivers, janitors, parents, and administrative assistants, as well as the principal?

As kids got older, the parental involvement that seemed to matter most was different but related. All over the world, parents who discussed movies, books, and current affairs with their kids had teenagers who performed better in reading. Here again, parents who engaged their kids in conversation about things larger than themselves were essentially teaching their kids to become thinking adults. Unlike volunteering in schools, those kinds of parental efforts delivered clear and convincing results, even across different countries and different income levels.

Most of us would speak to the most casual acquaintance with more apparent respect than to our own children, or the children with whom we work in the classroom. Why? Because we do not have power over the near-stranger; because we have no ego-involvement with that person…

MATTERS: The child’s parents are involved in the PTA. DOESN’T: The child frequently watches television. A child whose parents are involved in the PTA tends to do well in school—which probably indicates that parents with a strong relationship to education get involved in the PTA, not that their PTA involvement somehow makes their children smarter. The ECLS data show no correlation, meanwhile, between a child’s test scores and the amount of television he watches. Despite the conventional wisdom, watching television apparently does not turn a child’s brain to mush. (In Finland, whose education system has been ranked the world’s best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often learned to read on their own by watching American television with Finnish subtitles.) Nor, however, does using a computer at home turn a child into Einstein: the ECLS data show no correlation between computer use and school test scores.

Effective crime reduction policies involved early parenting classes, increasing the quality of education that children received, and providing children with a safe environment after school. Those options always looked too soft in the public arena.

Curriculum development is a collaborative endeavour, involving teachers, administrators, parents, and other stakeholders, all working together to provide the best possible education for students.