The newspaper ad appeared on Wednesday in The Cincinnati Enquirer and featured a large picture of the Representative and his two daughters.  Driehaus is “outraged” according to his spokesman, Time Mulvey.  ”He can take more than his fair share of political attacks, but this one crossed the line.”

The ad was paid for by the Committee to Rethink Reform, a Washington-based group that has already admitted that the ad was a mistake and apologized both in print, in another ad, and to the Representative.  The strangest part of the decision to break the unwritten rule that politicians children are off limits is that Driehaus is actually firmly against the reform bill.

Political ads involving children have become more and more of a problem of late on both sides.  This summer the White House had to put a stop to a series of ads from the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine that featured 8 year old vegetarian Jasmine Messaih questioning why the Presidents daughters had better lunch options than she did.  While the head of the PCRM did not see the ads as an infringement against the Obama girls, and the ads in Ohio did not directly attack Driehaus’ children, politicians maintain that mentioning their children in reference to their politics at all is dirty pool.  What do you think?

Which is exactly what critics of the program have a problem with – making kids ride in ad ladened buses isn’t much better than selling ad space on chalk boards.  Of course, some schools are already selling ad space inside their schools too. Jefferson County Schools, the biggest district in Colorado, has a contract with First Bank of Colorado that is worth $500,000 over four years.  This contract entitles First Bank to logos on 100 of the districts 350 buses, and a prominent display of their logo in every high school gym in the district, on the district Web page, in district stadiums and a company announcement during sports events.

And controlling the content of the ads isn’t as easy as you’d think it would be. A Southern California highway authority recently lost their battle to keep the Minutemen militia group from getting an “adopt a highway” type advertising sign put up.  It’s a 1st Amendment issue and the same logic is likely to hold for school transportation.  What happens when parents don’t agree with the advertisements their children are being exposed to at school? “Parents who are concerned about commercial messages will have no choice,” according to Josh Colin, associate director of Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. “Parents won’t be given the option to send their kids on the ad-free bus.”

Another big problem is that, even if you’re willing to force the kids exposure to advertising, “It’s not as large a revenue generator as you might think,” according to Mike Griffith, a policy analyst for the Education Commission of the States. The Jefferson County deal with First Bank amounts to $7 a bus per day – just a fraction of the districts $959 million budget.  Oh, and most districts actually have to hire someone new to sell their new ad space.  According to Griffith, that extra cost usually cuts profits enough to discourage adopting the policy.  But, a lot of will to try in these tough times, including Colorado, Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas.

When we were kids, I always had someone to play with even if we fought over what to play and who got which toy.  My brother and I used to make a deal that if I played GI Joes with him that he would play Barbies with me.  I was never lonely.  If I got into a fight with my friends, I always had a brother or sister’s shoulder to lean on and talk to about it.  And since we spent all of that time together while we were growing up, we have lots of inside jokes and stories to reminisce about now.  I try to explain them to other people like my husband, but it is usually one of those things where you just had to be there.

I was a sophomore in high school the first time I remember being really grateful for my big brother.  There was a girl who was a year older than me that kept trying to pick fights and bully me.  My brother was a popular senior.  When I told him what was going on, he spent his lunches with me and my friends for two weeks “escorting” us around campus until the whole thing blew over.  For those two weeks I felt so safe and secure.  Every time that girl saw him, she went scurrying the other way.  It wasn’t the first time he had stood up for me, but it was the first that I had noticed enough to realize how great he was.  Now, when I am scared about something, he is the first person I call.  There are not a lot of bullies anymore but when life starts to stress me out, he is always there to calm my fears and I like to think that I do the same for him too.

Both of my brothers played football in high school and one went on to play in college.  My sister and I were at every game we could go to, cheering them on.  I remember several times that I nearly lost my voice yelling for them.  Those games were a metaphor for our whole lives.  Whether it is a play that my brother is in (now that he is an actor) or an emergency like when my son broke his leg, we are all there to support and encourage each other.   There is no one in this world that I am as genuinely happy for, and constantly rooting for, then those three people (except for maybe the rest of my immediate family).

Now I like to watch my three kids play (and sometimes even fight) with each other.  And although they may not realize it right now, I know that they are forming a bond that they will have for the rest of their lives.  And I can’t think of a better gift that we could have given them.

These days more and more people are looking for greener, and more economic, ways to do household chores.  Kitchen gardens and keeping small domestic food animals like chickens are in vogue again, as is air drying laundry.  But one Philadelphia area mother is having to fight for her right to air dry.  Patty Pozeynot of Skippack Township, Pennsylvania was fined $100 for hanging her laundry to dry on her back porch.

The Hunter Ridge development where Pozeynot lives does have an ordinance against hanging laundry outside, even in the back yard, but Pozeynot says that the rule was put in place a year after she moved in and she feels it’s not fair.  She told NBC Philadelphia, “I wanna hang out my laundry because I think it’s better for our environment, it’s the green thing to do.” Some of her neighbors, however, don’t want to see the rules bent.

“You change one rule, what’s going to be next,” resident Karen Kelly asks. ” I think if everybody did it, I don’t think it would look appealing.”

Pozeynot has considered moving, but she doesn’t want to uproot her kids so she has decided to stay and fight.  To legally hang her clothes, she needs more than half of her 55 neighbors to sign a petition allowing her to continue.  A neighbor in a nearby home has gotten the necessary signatures, but Pozeynot only has 19 of the 38 she needs.

“I try to put the kids in the best educational system possible and I think there is something to be said for their father, who has been blessed to play in the NFL and do something he’s loved to do, going back and finishing what he started,” Warren said from the campus of Texas A&M. “In the big picture, I think it’s important for me to do what I’m doing. I can sacrifice that bonus for that.”

This will be the first time in eight years that Ty will not be attending any sort of voluntary workout sessions before the NFL season.  He has always done some training regime to keep his body in condition.  This time he will be focusing on conditioning his mind and showing his children, Brionna, Brielle and Bailey, how important their education is even if they are blessed with other abilities.  An education is important enough for him to not only pay for the opportunity to be in classes but to also give up easy money elsewhere.  That is an extremely admirable decision.

Kids should know who Ty Warren is and understand what he is doing and how they should take the same mindset when it comes to their schooling.  Ty has one of the coolest jobs in the world, he gets to play a game for money, but he still values his education.  Better yet, he is doing to because he knows his kids look up to him and he is being a positive role model for them.

In the adult world, this kind of prior restraint would be a violation of the First Amendment.  Public school students once enjoyed the same First Amendment rights as adults, but the 1988 Supreme Court case of Hazelwood vs. Kuhlmer established that, as publishers of their school newspapers, school districts, have the right to censorship.  That leaves the student journalists of the Viewer with few options other than what they’ve done – walk off the job.

The trouble started when the paper decided to publish a story about the school’s handling of two students who posted a “joke” picture of a teacher on Facebook.  Wikelius claims that she asked the paper to pull the story to protect student confidentiality – she was concerned about releasing private disciplinary information without parental consent.  Christina Xia, the student editor of the Viewer, says that the paper had gotten parental permission to publish the children in question’s names.  They just hadn’t gotten signed parental waivers, but they were able to do so by the end of the day and go ahead with distribution of the paper.

Xia says that by the Viewer received Wikelius’ initial the request to drop the article, the paper had already gone to the printers.  They had interviewed the Principal five days earlier.  Xia is hoping that they can work the issue out internally and lift the prior review rule. “I do not believe that prior review is the solution,” Xia says on the Student Press Law Center’s website.  ”I think that prior review will limit us from learning responsible journalism.”

1. Let kids help. Decide what you are going to put in their lunch.  For example one fruit, one veggie, one treat and a drink.  Fill a bowl with different fruits, one with different veggies, etc.  Then when you have to pack lunches let your kids pick which fruit, which veggie, etc that they want.  This ensures that they will eat their choice and it will make lunch packing go faster with all of the extra hands.
2. Make a chart. Make columns on a dry erase board for each food group.  Have kids fill in their favorites for each group.  Then make a deal that you can pack their lunch with anything that is on that board and they will eat it.  You may even discover some ideas from your kids that you might not have thought of yourself.
3. Make a theme. Bust a rut by packing lunches with a theme.  You can pack all things that are all round, square, green, orange, etc.  Or you can pack a cowboy lunch with BBQ fare or a circus lunch complete with kettle corn.
4. Get Crafty. Stick Con-Tact paper on the inside lid of a lunch box and, voila!, you have an instant dry erase board.  You can write messages, jokes or interesting facts for them to read to fellow classmates.  You can even include a dry erase marker and draw up a game of tic-tac-toe or hang-man for them to play.
5. Give Sandwiches A Face Lift. If your child has a habit of ignoring your sandwiches, try this quick fix.  Pull out your cookie cutters and cut their sandwich into fun shapes, making them instantly more appetizing to little peepers.

This study of 120 infants between the ages of 5 months and 2 years old, found that its subjects reacted strongly and rhythmically in response to music. “Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than the other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants,” says researcher Marcel Zentner, a psychologist at the University of York in England.  ”We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music, the more they smiled.”

To test baby’s reactions to music, researchers played recordings of classical music, rhythmic beats and speech to infants and videotaped the results. They also brought in professional ballet dancers to analyze how well the babies were moving to the music.  To keep the babies’ parents from influencing them, they were given headphones to make sure they couldn’t hear the music and unthinkingly move with it.

Though this new research has shown that the ability to move to a rhythmic beat is innate in humans, researchers still have no idea why.  ”It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition,” Zentner said.  ”One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing.”

Zentner and Tuomas Eerola, from the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyvaskyla, in Finland, published their findings in the March 15 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Click here to see their subjects rocking to the beat.

Sixty-eight year old Ralph Conone was arrested on March 10th in a Columbus, Ohio Wal-Mart after another shopper accused him of hitting her sons, a six-year-old and a seven-year-old.  Surveillance videos both confirm the attack on the two children, but also show Conone assaulting two other children who they are still trying to identify.

Sgt. John Hurst of the special victim’s bureau of the Columbus Police Department told the Columbus Dispatch that, “He stated that he does this because of the excitement of being able to do it and get away with it with the parents right there.  He’ll just strike them in the head and just turn around and walk away.” Conone hits his victims with a closed fist wrapped around a protruding key.

When questioned further, Conone also revealed that he targeted young children because they couldn’t do anything to protect themselves. Conone is divorced, lives alone and apparently is a manic depressive with mental issues.  He does not have a prior criminal record.  Investigators believe that Conone is responsible for multiple other assaults dating from the beginning of this year.  As of Sunday, they have only filed two additional charges.  The new charges are related to a two year old who was assaulted in two separate incidents in the same Wal-Mart on February 28th.

Conone is being held on a $150,000 bond and will be placed under house arrest if he makes bail.  He has also been banned from Wal-Mart.  As a parent, this incident can only emphasize how important it is to keep a close eye on kids in stores and to make sure you children are well trained to make a lot of noise if a stranger does something to hurt them or take them.

It may be Facebook’s turn to sue someone

The author of the original article, Mark Williams-Thomas, claims that within minutes his fictional teenage girl was being sexually propositioned.  The writer is clearly out to terrify parents, using language like “adventure playground” when describing how pedophiles view the site. While the Daily Mail has offered a “clarification” of the article, it still hasn’t named the actual site the fake account was set up on.  Facebook, which has faced plenty of criticism about vulnerability of children on its site and gone to great lengths to address the problem, is naturally upset to be associated with such a damning article.

Should you be worried? Probably no more than you should be of the fact that your teenager probably also spends time at the local mall or drives to and from school. A bit of parental supervision and a lot of education about these dangers goes a long way. Facebook in particular has made a huge effort to find and eliminate predatory users, including making it impossible for users over the age of 18 to message users under the age of 18 that they don’t have a relationship with. Williams-Thomas maintains that he never associated his article with Facebook and that his editors changed the article to include the networking site, despite the fact that Williams-Thomas told them it was wrong.

The problem with all of these lies is just that: they’re lies. The problem with telling a lie is that it’s likely to be discovered to be a lie sooner or later. At best, these ten lies insult the intelligence of your child; at worst, they breed fear and false hope. Another example: “Don’t worry, sweetie, that can’t happen here.” The accompanying explanation to support the lie says that we’re meant to ease the worries of our children with this lie, but what happens when the worst does happen? In this particular example, a far better thing to tell a child is that 1) the odds are against something disastrous happening, and 2) if something terrible does happen, there are ways that we know to fix/preempt it. That puts the power into the family’s hands, and turns the situation from something unstoppable into something manageable.

Look over the list yourself and think of ways to better address each particular situation than what the article advises. I guarantee you’ll find something more positive than what’s listed — and let’s hope the post is meant to be humorous.

The first time Patty Clement noticed that Rex Roland had written “loser” in the margins of her daughter’s paper she went to the principal of her daughter’s school, Enka Middle School.  They assured her that it wouldn’t happen again, but recently Clement saw the words “minus 20% for being a loser” written on another assignment.  ”This is wrong,” Clement told Asheville’s WLOS-TV. “The techniques need to change.”

Other parents don’t see the problem with Roland’s behavior. “A lot of the students he has are academically gifted students, and so one of the ways that he would joke with them would be if they scored a 110, he always gave extra credit, so if they scored a 110, 120 on a paper, he would have a joke on it — ‘loser’,” one parent, Kathy Andrews, told WLOS. “That’s what he engages in… he gets on their level and their words and tries to relate to them.”  Whether or not Patty Clement’s daughter was being called a “loser” on high scoring papers or not is unclear, but Clement does mention in one interview that the word was written next to a small mistake.

Ian Andrews, Kathy Andrews’ son, may have thought that Roland was a “cool teacher that people wanted to be in class with.” but Clement says that he has been bullying and harassing her daughter.  It’s not just on papers either, according to Clement, “he threw my daughter’s pencil box in the hallway and she got in trouble by another teacher for disrupting his class — for something that she did not do.”

It’s gotten worse. Clement’s daughter has received almost 100 threatening text messages in the last week, forcing her mother to keep her home from school.  The school district views the matter as “a personnel matter” that is subject to ongoing investigation.  Roland apologized for using the “l-word” but still insists that it is his way of relating to his students.

So what the heck is an “ide” exactly? The months of March, May, July and October have Ides on the 15th of the month, the rest of the calendar year Ides are on the 13th day.  The word Ide’s Latin roots mean “divide” and that’s exactly what these days do – divide the month.  In Roman times, before the execution of Julius Caesar that is, the Ides were most notable for being the day on which debts were settled.  After the assassination how Roman citizens felt about the Ides depended on how they felt about the fall of Caesar.  According to Philip Freeman, a classicist at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa – “How they felt depended on their political position, some were thrilled that Caesar had died, some where horrified.”

Shakespeare contemporaries would have also been fascinated with the Ides, and not just because, as Georgianna Ziegler, head of reference at the Folder Shakespeare library in Washington D.C. points out, “‘Beware the ides of March,’ is a pithy line and people remember it, even if they don’t know why.” In 1599, the year most historian’s agree that the play was likely performed, timekeeping was a big deal.  Ziegler says that, “They were really struck by the differences between their Julian calendar (a revision of the Roman calendar created by Caesar) and the Gregorian calendar kept in Catholic countries on the continent.”  The two calendars had diverged significantly at this point, so it was understandably a topic of note for people of the time.  Imagine New York deciding the year had 370 days instead of 365 – it would get confusing after awhile.

For those of us who are not Julius Caesar, the Ides don’t really offer us much to worry about other than unpaid bills.  So enjoy the Ides, pay your bills and watch out for guys named Brutus.

Brooklyn mom Gezime Amer can honestly say she’s never had a single baby… because all of her children have come in pairs.  She gave birth to her first set of twins 12 years ago, a beautiful pair of boys.  She and her husband were hoping for a girl with their second pregnancy two years later.  They got their wish. Except instead of one girl, they got two.

“Got blessed me with the genes to have twins,” said Gezime.  ”They came to me all natural, too.” Amer’s gynecologist, Ayman Shahine, says that he’s never come across a mom so genetically prone to twins in his twenty years of practice.  ”Her genes are like that,” Shahine says.  ”When she had her first twins, she was scared. Then she had two girls and she could not believe it.  Now, she’s an expert.”

Multiple sets of twins in the same family are rare.  Three in a row is almost unheard of.  Only 15 of the 26,000 members of the National Organization of Mothers of Twins have reported giving birth to several sets of twins.

While Amer will admit that extra babies have made her family, who live on her husbands hardware store manager’s salary, hard pressed for cash and time, she loves her children and is thrilled to have another pair on the way.  ”We teach them that we may not have a lot, but we have each other,” she says.  ”Blood is thicker than water.”

The older sets of twins are excited too. They love being twins and they’re happy their new siblings will have the same experiences – “When you are [a] twin, you know someone always has your back,” Said Kerima, one of the 10 year old female set of twins, “You know you’ll never be alone.”

She began creating MySpace layouts and themes for pages and created the website Whateverlife.com for others to come and download the code for the pages.  It was a HUGE success and Ashley became a very rich business owner in a very short while.  Ashley was receiving a quarter of a million hits everyday and she started attracting sponsors offering big money to put their ads on her page.  We’re talking millions of dollars in revenue off of something she likes to do in her own free time.

Soon Ashley was employing not only her close friends but even her mother.  She purchased her family a new home in a nice community and continues to evolve her business towards new and creative ideas.

Ashley is a great role model for your kids, even though she spent most of her time on the Internet, she was able to produce something positive for her and the people around her.  Anyone who can do what they want and evolve it into an idea that makes money is someone worth admiring.

Accomplishments

• Created highly popular website at age 14
• Website achieved more that 250,000 hits a day
• Appeared on ‘The View’ to highlight her achievement
• Purchased home for family
• Multimillionaire before age 20

Other role models for your kids:

• Child Role Models – Sage Karam, 15
• Child Role Models – Cameron Johnson, 24
• Child Role Models – Mirai Nagasu, 16
• Child Role Models – Akrit Jaswal, 17
• Child Role Models – Hannah Taylor, 13

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It’s true. Bronson Staker was dead when he arrived at the hospital after drowning in his bathtub.  But Friday morning he was burbling happily on his father’s lap while his parents were interviewed on the Today Show, more interested in his dad’s cell phone than his own miraculous recovery.

Six weeks ago, Bronson’s mother, Sara, put him in the tub for a bath.  She stepped away momentarily to deal with another of her children, and when she came back she found Bronson face down in the water.  ”It was horrible.  It was the most helpless feeling I’ve ever had in my life,” Sara told the Today Show.  ”There was no question in my mind that he was gone.  He was white, his lips were blue. His eyes were rolled back.”

Emergency responders were also unable to revive Bronson and he was declared DOA – Dead On Arrival – when he reached the hospital. But his doctors didn’t give up, and forty minutes later they finally restored a heartbeat, while a ventilator pumped oxygen into Bronson’s lungs.  Bronson’s doctors told his parents that it was very likely that their baby would have serious brain damage from having been oxygen deprived for so long, but there was something that might help reduce that chance.  An experimental treatment that could help them recover more of the child they’d lost.

That treatment is called Therapeutic Hypothermia.  They would lower Bronson’s body temperature to 91 degrees, 8 degrees below normal, and put him in a medically induced coma to reduce brain swelling.  The Staker’s agreed, and for almost 2 weeks they watched, helpless, as their baby slept alone in a cooling unit, puffy and cold to the touch. “It was excruciating, because every fiber of your being as a mother wants to hold your child, especially when they’re hurting.” Sara told the Today Show. “You want to hold him and hug him and wrap him in a blanket and keep him warm.”

Doctors had told the Stokers that Bronson would probably not be the boy they’d known when he woke up.  That he would likely be the equivalent of a 16 month old newborn, needing months or years of rehab.  But Bronson didn’t get the memo – when he woke up, he was fully alert.  ”I walked in the room and the lights were on.  Immediately I could see that he was tracking and connecting and looking from on nurse to the other.  When I walked in, he lifted his chin and I could see that he knew who I was,” His mother says.

By the time the family took Bronson home, he’d achieved every bench mark doctors had set for him for the next year – he was back to his old self.  In fact, he walked out of the hospital on his own two feet.

Bronson’s parents hope that other parents will learn from their hard lesson.  As Sara put it, “Life is so fragile.  As parents, we’re so busy and we try to multi-task things.  It’s really easy to get distracted by the things that aren’t the most important things, and the things that are the most important suffer.”

“Crystal’s Soapbox,” published each Thursday, is a column by conservative Texas mom Crystal Arcand who loves to rant about issues that relate to her kids….and yours.

You know, not too long ago there was a big hoopla about a dad that let his seven-year-old get tattooed. There was talk of child endangerment and parents had proverbial cows about poking that poor baby with needles. “What kind of parent would do such a thing?!” everyone asked hysterically.

Then somehow the parenting world had been anesthetized to it by the time the Tattoo Barbie had come out. Sure, some were against it, but they still sold, and a lot of parents doled out the logic of “letting them try it” before kids made a permanent decision. It was touted by some as an opportunity for discussion.

And yet, there is no discussion about ear piercing. The discussion always seems to be centered on whether silver or gold earrings are preferred during the six-week healing period after the initial piercing. I’ve never heard getting your ears pierced compared to getting a tattoo. But it is like getting a tattoo. It’s a permanent alteration to the body. The effects of it last forever. Just like a tattoo.

Well, kind of. You can have a tattoo removed. You can’t remove earring holes. Sure, they can grow closed, just like mine did. But the scars are still there. It drives me crazy. I wish my mother had talked to me about the permanence of it before I got my ears pierced at nine – I wouldn’t have had it done.

The other day while I was in the grocery store I saw a baby with earrings. She couldn’t have been more than six months old. Did she tell her mother that she wanted holes in ears for the rest of her life? Or did she try to tell her, “Hey, Mom, y’know it hurts to try to sleep with these tiny metal spikes poking me in the neck no matter which side I sleep on, because I’ve got them on both sides, so no thanks, anyway.”

Oh wait, she didn’t. Because she’s a baby. She had no choice or say in the matter.

Why is it okay to poke a baby with needles as long as it’s in the ears instead of the hip or somewhere else? Is it the lack of ink? The precious metal? The gems? Oh, it’s cute, right? It’s totally okay to inflict pain on infants as long as they’re cute when we’re done. It only lasts a little while, right? Newsflash: tattoos don’t hurt after the healing is over, either.

Let’s get a grip and stop hurting babies that don’t understand what’s going on for the sake of “cute.” Buy a freakin’ hair accessory already.

The study was done in 49 remote Hutterite farming colonies in western Canada.  The Hutterites are descendants of a 16th-century Swiss Protestant sect who live in isolated communities.  Although they avoid some technology, the Hutterites drive cars and modern tractors and, most importantly in this case, live in communities of up to 160 people, own everything jointly, attend their own schools, eat in one dining hall and avoid contact with the outside world.  They have no objection to modern medicine, and, while they deliberately distance themselves from the mainstream world, they emphasize acts of generosity like blood donation.

Although previous studies have demonstrated this effect before, none have been so clear cut because they were done in less isolated places with more sources of flu passing in and out of the community. In late 2008, the study provided all children ages 3 to 15 in 25 of the colonies with the flu shot.  In 24 others, they gave children doses of the hepatitis A vaccine as a placebo.  By last June, more than 10 percent of all adults and children in the placebo colonies had contracted the seasonal flu at some point.  Less than 5 percent of those in the colonies with immunized children had gotten it and here was a 60 percent “protective effect” for the whole community, the study concluded.  That implies giving flu shots to schoolchildren protects the elderly from the flu just as well as giving the elderly flu shots directly. The C.D.C does, however, still recommend that “high-risk people” including the elderly, get shots – even if children in their community are fully immunized.

The Common Core plan is a breakthrough after years of stalemate over the role of the federal government in setting education standards. Both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations tried to establish voluntary national standards in the 1990s and failed.  As a result, analysts report, many states have weakened standards since 2000 in order to help their schools meet the requirements of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law.

The proposal seeks to avoid controversy over federal interference in the school system, which has traditionally been the territory of the state governments, by keeping the Obama administration out of the process of drafting the blue print.  President Obama has lauded the governors’ initiative, however, and on February 22nd he said that federal aid for disadvantaged students should depend on whether states certify their standards are “college- and career-ready.”  That description perfectly matches the goals stated in the new proposal, making it clear that he plans to reward participation in the Common Core plan with federal dollars.

Every state in the union except for Alaska and Texas has given initial support for the effort.  Kentucky has already adopted the proposal, acting last month on a late-stage draft before public release.  Experts say that some some states will resist, but, ultimately, as education policy blogger Susan Ohanian puts it, “It’s a done deal because Obama attached all this money.”

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents major urban systems, thinks the proposal is crucial for improving the floundering public education system: “It’s very clear to us that when standards are high, it elevates the performance of kids and schools.  Where they are low, it appears to serve as a drag on your ability to get faster gains.”

Depression, anxiety, and substance abuse are among the other likely results seen in adults. It’s thought that when the body undergoes a stressful situation, elements of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system help regulate the body’s response. However, repeated trauma may damage this system, leading to the far-reaching effects outlined above.

As parents, we tend to forget sometimes that when we argue, the tensions can spill over and affect our children. They may be sitting in the next room, but when a certain angry tone comes to them, they tend to stop and listen. Not only is it unfair to the child to be witness to this, according to this study, it may actively harm their future selves. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, really, but a long-term research project like this one is more proof that we do not exist in a vacuum. Our children must be taken into account at all times.

When you feel yourselves on the cusp of a big public blowup, it’s helpful to ask of each other: “Does this help?” It may ease your personal stress to shout and get angry, but does it really help? Chances are that even arguments of substance can be shelved until your child is sleeping. Best yet, just learn to cope with frustration before it happens. Practice breathing. Exercise more. Anything you can do to prevent your children from future pain should be your goal at all times.

It could be said that America is obsessed with having things. We are one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, and that is the by-product of our need to own things. It’s such a powerful need, in fact, that we’ve got other countries making things for us; it’s not a local phenomenon. But for all of our focus on procurement, we spend very little time thinking about where all of these things go when we’ve lost our use for them and throw them away.

This issue is the subject of a successful viral video made by Annie Leonard entitled “The Story of Stuff”, a 21-minute long look at the chain of events that brings things into our homes, from extraction, to production, to distribution, to consumption, to disposal. The video was so successful, in fact, that it spawned a new book of the same name, in which the author details her journey of learning about how this process works, and what it’s done to the world we inhabit.

Most of us don’t consider trash after it’s been taken away by the garbage men, and because we don’t, our children won’t either. It’s up to us to take the time to learn more about the Materials Economy, how it affects our environment, and to teach that to our kids. They’re going to inherit what we’ve left behind, and they’re the ones upon whom it will fall to invent new ways to manage their world. This is not a problem that’s going to just vanish. Let’s figure it out while we still have time.

A seven year old boy’s quick thinking saved his parents, and likely his little sister’s, lives early Tuesday morning when armed gunmen broke into his Southern California home.  The little boy, Carlos, grabbed his sister and ran into the bathroom with the phone, locking the door behind him.

He then dialed 9-1-1 and informed the operator that “There’s some guy who’s going to kill my mom and dad,” then breathlessly demanded: “Bring cops. A lot of them!… And soldiers, too.”  Though terrified, the little boy bravely pulled himself together when the 9-1-1 operator asked him to stay on the line and describe the attackers.  Then there was a crash as the suspects broke into the bathroom, and a scream.

Los Angeles County sheriff’s Lt. Steve Kenny says that, at this point, the suspects grabbed the boy and asked him who he called.  Showing a levelheadedness that most adults might have had trouble finding in similar situations, he replied, “9-1-1.” The gunmen then fled without stealing anything or hurting the family.  It might have easily gone very differently.  Sheriff’s Captain Pat Maxwell told Fox News that “If not for the brave and educated actions of the 7 year old boy, this might have ended tragically.

Teaching children how to dial 9-1-1 is incredibly important, as this story shows us.  Not only is it important to help children memorize the emergency phone number and their own address to tell the dispatcher, practicing making an emergency call can help children remain calm in an actual emergency.

Sadly, this is the kind of world in which we have to raise our children. A seemingly casual, flippant remark, made in innocence, can easily backfire and turn the speaker into something perceived as malevolent. It’s no longer enough to say “That’s not what I meant”; we have to edit ourselves before saying anything at all.

However, we should be teaching our children this lesson anyway. If a child inadvertently hurts another’s feelings, she might say “I didn’t mean to”, but the result speaks for itself. It’s a sign that, good intentions or ill, mistakes sometimes get made. Maybe you didn’t mean to hurt someone, but you did, and now you know better. This is good for growth. We can’t expect a five year old to be aware of her strength, or limitations, or boundaries at all times. She’s learning from experience, which is the best teacher. But we can show that there are always consequences for every action, whether purposefully made or accidental. There is always room for apologies, and a genuine desire to make amends, which is, in the end, the most important issue.

• Trying to cover his eyes every time a movie featuring gunfire suddenly popped up. Thanks to “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker“, this became challenging. We’re trying to raise our son to be unaware of the use of firearms as much as possible. Sure, he’s been to friends’ houses where there are Nerf guns present, but he calls them “launchers”, and is (we hope) unaware of the death-dealing nature of real guns. Someday, of course, this will come to a head, but we believe by that point he’ll have developed the necessary understanding to deal with it all. But it is kind of a problem when you have something that interests a child — the cartoonish nature of the graphics of “Avatar” and “Up” combined with the serious violence of “Hurt Locker” and “District 9″.

• Explaining to my son that there are hundreds of people involved in the making of any movie, not just the people who come up to receive the award. It’s kind of a difficult process to describe, the notion that nothing of what you seen on screen is real. The people are actors, saying things written by someone else, wearing clothes designed for them, walking around an environment with some degree of artificiality — even if it’s just the lighting — right down to the people in the background who are just passing by. None of it is real. This turned out to be a great conversation, as it seemed to open to my son the idea that he too could work on a movie some day, in some capacity.

• Describing the process of selection of winners. This is a thornier issue than you might think. If you like a movie and think it should win, what does it mean when it doesn’t? Do you just have bad taste? Explaining critical thought is a toughie to a 6 year old, who has pretty strong ideas of what he likes and dislikes. And that’s even before any talk of “politics” or “favoritism”.

• Picking up on what excited my son. While he enjoyed seeing clips of movies he hadn’t seen, what really drove his attention was the constantly changing backdrop. Every time a new element would appear (what was the idea behind that wall of lamps, by the way?) he’d say “What is that?” and there wasn’t always a good explanation for him. I had to admit: as a visual phenomenon, the Oscars isn’t the best. The majority of the time is spent watching people talk, and unless you know the speaker or have a personal stake in what’s being said — neither of which can be said of my son — it’s all blah blah blah until you get to the next moving set piece or movie clip.

* Having to hurry my son out of the room when the suddenly announced tribute to horror movies appeared on screen. Thanks, Academy.

The final take away from all this for me was: Where does true value lie? If you and I disagree about the worth of a thing, are we both right or both wrong? Does it even then matter to make a judgment at all? What does it mean not to win an award of any sort? Isn’t the value in the effort, as researchers are now telling us we should emphasize to our kids? Is this idea reflected in our media? Watching the Academy Awards with my 6 year old son was more enriching than I expected it to be, and I’m happy that we did — if not for the reasons ABC hoped.

Which is probably why the House of Representatives easily passed a bill on March 3rd to restrict the use of forcible restraint and seclusion on children in schools that receive federal funding.  A companion bill will be debated on the floor of the Senate soon.

According to the New York Times, the bill was in part inspired by a government report last year that found that hundreds of kids of all ages were being emotionally traumatized and physically harmed by being restrained or locked up.  Sometimes even tied to chairs.  Even worse, often the children who were treated this way were kids with developmental disabilities or who were in special education.

In one particularly horrifying incident a special ed 8th grader, Cedric Napoleon, was killed by his 8th grade teacher. “Cedric struggled as he was being held in his chair, so the teacher put him in a face down or in a prone restraint and sat on him,” Cedric’s foster mother, Toni Price, testified before the House Education and Labor Committee in May.

“He struggled and said repeatedly: ‘I can’t breathe.’ ‘If you can speak, you can breathe,’ she snapped at him,” Price relayed. “Shortly after that, he stopped speaking and he stopped struggling.  He stopped moving at all.  The teacher continued to restrain him.  Finally the teacher and aide put Cedric back in his chair. The aide wiped drool off his mouth and they sat him up.  But he slumped over and slipped out of his chair.”

Not all of the Representatives in the debate thought that not allowing schools to use restraints that restrict kid’s breathing or mechanical restraints (except in cases of extreme and imminent danger) or behavior controlling drugs (unless prescribed by a doctor) was a good idea. Rep. John Kline, R-Minn., argued that Congress should not tie schools hands when it came to discipline and that “the states and not the federal government should take the lead on developing and implementing these policies.”

His Republican colleague, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington disagreed: “This critical piece of legislation confronts the unimaginable situation in schools across the country whereby some of our nation’s most vulnerable children are treated in an inhumane and degrading manner.”

The American Federation of Teachers backs the bill.