Raising Wholesome Children in Today’s Culture: 10 Tips for Parents

Screen Shot 2015-04-24 at 10.46.42 AM

Following the publication of my recent Huffington Post article, “It’s Time for the Global Village to Stand Up for Our Children,” I feel much less alone with my anomie.

For the past 15 years, I have grown increasingly alarmed by, and vocal about, the ways in which our culture sexualizes young girls. I have parallel concerns about boys, who are messaged to view girls as objects—often by girls themselves, who have learned to tie their self-esteem to their sexual desirability, as so many marketers in this country have expertly orchestrated. Read more…

Kids, Social Media Use, and Cyberbullying: The Role of Parents

Last April, as I was up to my eyeballs in cyberbullying among my middle schoolers, a New Jersey middle school principal told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that he had emailed his students’ parents stating that “there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site.” He urged all parents to prohibit their children’s access at home, and he was met with tremendous resistance. Read more…

It’s Time for the Global Village to Stand Up for Our Children

When Abercrombie & Fitch recently launched their pushup padded bikini top for girls aged 8 to 12, something inside me finally broke. My anger was volcanic, flowing through friends and family, spewing onto Facebook and across Twitter. For an entire day I searched plaintively for others who could understand my disillusionment.

I found a few soul mates, in person and on the Internet, but what I mostly found was the screaming silence of indifference. I wanted to shake people, to shout at them to wake up and take a look around, to ask them to stop playing with their iPhones for a moment and pay attention. Read more…

10 Ways to Raise Resilient Kids in Turbulent Times

In the wake of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, parents, teachers, journalists and bloggers all over the world are discussing best practices for talking to children about disasters. Among my friends and colleagues, there is palpable angst about the effects of social media exposure on their children, who see and hear daily accounts of the war in Libya, destruction in Japan, and the threat of large-scale radiation exposure for thousands of citizens across the Pacific. As one friend posted on Facebook, “The world is on fire and I don’t know what to tell my son.” Read more…

A DAY IN THE CLASSROOM: Parents’ role in the bullying epidemic

I recently came upon a very short Boston Globe article — a paragraph, really — by a bullying expert in New Hampshire who stated, quite simply, that today’s school children are “the meanest ever” and that they have “more ways than ever to express that meanness.” Read more…

Categorized as: Parenting Children