children
lborkowski | July 30, 2010
New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here.
By Alice Shabecoff
As the massive oil slicks from the BP disaster continue to advance upon shores and communities, worries over the effects on wildlife and the natural environment abound, and rightfully so: hailed as the biggest oil spill in our nation's history, much of the damage is irreparable, with more inevitably to come. Yet policy makers, community members and advocates are strangely silent about another unavoidable danger: substantial harm to the children of the coast…
sastyk | June 29, 2010This weekend in the Washington Post, there's an article about a couple who first met while serving in various capacities during WWII, who just celebrated their marriage in DC this weekend after a "62 year engagement." This would be a romantic story in any context - but it isn't a story of parted lovers who finally found each other again after decades apart. Instead, it is of two men who have lived a life almost wholly together, sharing work, family and community, but who lacked legal and social recognition.
What's interesting about this story to me is not simply that it is a charming love…
aardvarchaeology | May 31, 2010When a family migrates, the members who pick up the local lingo first and best are generally the children, and they soon become little interpreters. My wife wrote letters to the Swedish authorities for her Chinese dad from the time she was 11. And when time rolled around for the biannual talk with the teachers about each pupil's scholastic progress, she was accompanied by her sister (1½ years older). I hear that such a setup, with all that it means for power relations in the family, can be a big problem for men from more strongly patriarchal traditions.
We're planning Juniorette's seventh…
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2010
My two days with Junior at the LinCon gaming convention in Linköping turned out even better than I'd hoped for. I had lots of fun myself, and as a geek dad I was extra happy that Junior took to the whole thing with such gusto. On Thursday evening, for instance, he was play-testing a convoluted unpublished sci-fi board game with some guys in their 20s and 30s while I sat at another table some ways off and played simpler games with my friend Hans and others. Dad proud.
Everybody at the convention was uncommonly friendly and open, as gamers often are. Most of us looked pretty geeky, but not…
aardvarchaeology | May 11, 2010
Last year part of my daughter's schoolyard was landscaped and fitted with new entertainments. The landscapers also built a stone circle right next to her classroom. (I attended that school myself in 1982-85. The building in the background was the council dentistry clinic where I was fitted with braces.)
Structures like these are known as domarringar, "judge circles", in Swedish archaeology. They're Early Iron Age grave superstructures dating from c. 500 BC to AD 500, each usually with a cremation urn buried somewhere inside the circle. The term "judge circle" comes from recent folklore (or…
aardvarchaeology | May 2, 2010It is of course a major issue of public discourse these days that the Catholic church has long systematically covered up child rape in the interests of the organisation's public image. But to my knowledge, nobody has attempted to justify the rapes with reference to Catholic religious doctrine. The church's attitude has roughly been "We think this is really nasty behaviour, but more importantly we don't want any bad press".
In Nigeria, it is illegal for anyone under the age of 18 to marry. But senator Ahmad Sani Yerima, 49, is under investigation for taking a girl as his fourth wife when she…
jgoldman | April 21, 2010This seems to have become unofficial volcano week, here at ScienceBlogs. If you haven't been following the coverage of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption at Erik Klemetti's Eruptions blog, you should consider doing so. Also, Dr. Isis has a post on how the eruption has fouled up all nuclear imaging plans at her place of research, and Ethan explains how volcanic lightening works.
Our benevolent overlords have further commented: "Eyjafjallajökull's ill temper has been an unexpected object lesson in the complexity and interconnectedness of our environment, technology, and social networks." To that I…
aardvarchaeology | April 20, 2010Juniorette has drawn a pretty fierce lion. I imagine sitting in a tree, being growled at from below.
sastyk | April 16, 2010Hat tip to Rod Dreher for pointing out what he deems the most depressing toy ever - yes, your little one can have his or her own cubicle! Has your two year old been falling down on the hard, tedious job of being a child - here's a way of ensuring that she's ready for a life of dismal monotony!
Now you can make home more like the office, enhance the number of hours of screen time (children between 2 and 5 years old only get a measly 32.5 hours of screen time per day on average, gotta get those numbers up!) and bring Dilbert to life for your child.
It is every parent's dream!
Sharon
aardvarchaeology | April 5, 2010
On Easter Saturday, many Swedish kids receive candy-filled cardboard eggs. Mine have to jump through a lot of hoops to get theirs. Often I have made paper trails around the house, "Under yellow table", "Inside broom closet", "In Dad's rubber boot". Then increasingly (as Junior grew) I have obfuscated the clues by swapping à for all vowels, writing them backwards or writing them in English. Sometimes I've prepared GPS-based outdoor egg hunts. And that's what Juniorette faced this year, without any help from her older brother who was with his mom. She found the egg soon enough, once she had…
aardvarchaeology | March 23, 2010You know the bit in Khalil Gibran where he says that children are arrows and parents bows, not archers? The other day my kids recorded this rendition of the "Handy Manny" theme song, and then Junior edited it in Audacity. The same evening he played his first game of Agricola where he ended up sharing second place with me despite making tea and sandwiches for everyone while playing. He'll be twelve in July...
aardvarchaeology | March 12, 2010Here's an interesting case. A woman took her baby to Danderyd church (where I once took first communion) and had the child baptised -- against the father's wishes, as it turned out. He isn't happy. And the priest admits that he should have checked with the dad but that he didn't.
Bo Larsson, provost of the see of Stockholm, comments (and I translate):
"When I became a priest in the mid-70s, the nuclear family was the unquestioned standard, but today's relationship patterns are infinitely more varied than they were 20 or 30 years ago and I feel that it has become even more important that the…
aardvarchaeology | March 8, 2010
Last week was skiing break for my kids. I couldn't find anywhere good to stay in the mountains, so we didn't go off on holiday. Here's what we did for fun instead.
Dinner at the home of a Chinese friend. It was one of those no hablar parties that spouses in multi-ethnic marriages know all about. The food was great and everybody there except me spoke Mandarin - loudly and incessantly. I've never minded much: this time I had brought a book and there was a computer to play with.
Birthday party at the home of an Iranian friend. He used to be a death-metal kid. Now he's a pro-democracy Persian…
grrlscientist | March 6, 2010tags: children, religion, cults, mind control, television, silly, offbeat, beliefs, funny, education, streaming video
This amusing video is from a British TV show, Outnumbered. In this clip, young Ben asks the vicar some awkward questions about Jesus -- questions that most religious people have been asked at one time or another.
grrlscientist | February 7, 2010tags: gay adoption, United States, equality, religion, children, religion, hypocrisy, Dan+Savage, streaming video
Unlike straight parents, gay parents cannot go out one night, get drunk and adopt. Unlike straight parents, gay parents have children because they are wanted and planned for. Certainly this was the situation for my (straight) so-called parents, who not only didn't plan for me and didn't want me, but they were horribly abusive and neglectful after I was born, and after they'd finished trying to destroy me, they gave me up to the state when I was a teen-ager. I would love to have…
aardvarchaeology | February 1, 2010It's time for the annual Global Population Speak Out. We all know that in order not to crash the planet we need to consume less energy and raw materials and we need to emit less pollutants. But it doesn't seem to be generally known that nothing an affluent Westerner does can have anywhere near as beneficial an effect on the future environment as not having kids. Riding a bike to work, recycling milk cartons, turning off the outdoor lamp before you go to bed -- all of those green efforts of yours will be swamped and obviated if you have that extra kid.
Think about it. If there were only a few…
sastyk | January 4, 2010Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street.
Who will grow your food in the coming decades?
A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe…
sastyk | December 20, 2009Dear Sharon: Some of my friends say there is no Santa Claus. But I really need to know if there is. My Mom has been telling me about something called global warming, and I'm worried about Santa, because he lives up at the North Pole, and if it melts, he'll be in trouble. My Mom said some grownups were working hard in a place called Copenhagen to fix the problem, and I heard someone on the news say they decided something and someone else said they didn't. What happened in Copenhagen? Is there really a Santa, and what's going to happen to the North Pole? Please tell me the truth!…
ddobbs | December 18, 2009If you need a neurohook, think language acquisition, attention, mirror neurons, make your pick. No need. This one wins on entertainment value alone. via the twitter feed of the fine writer P.D. Smith.
When you're done, tune into RadioLab's stunning piece on Hamlet's last utterings.
aardvarchaeology | November 18, 2009My 6-y-o daughter usually sleeps really solidly over in her room and is not easily woken by sounds she's accustomed to. But this morning she told me over breakfast, "Dad, you and Mom made the weirdest noises last night and woke me. First Mom kind of whined and sounded as if she was gonna sneeze. Then nothing for a while. And then you started sounding like an elephant! You made one heck of a racket -- Det var ett jäkla liv."