"The Growing Backlash Against Overparenting"

Friday, Nov. 20, 2009

By Nancy Gibbs

The insanity crept up on us slowly; we just wanted what was best for our kids. We bought macrobiotic cupcakes and hypoallergenic socks, hired tutors to correct a 5-year-old's "pencil-holding deficiency," hooked up broadband connections in the treehouse but took down the swing set after the second skinned knee. We hovered over every school, playground and practice field — "helicopter parents," teachers christened us, a phenomenon that spread to parents of all ages, races and regions. Stores began marketing stove-knob covers and "Kinderkords" (also known as leashes; they allow "three full feet of freedom for both you and your child") and Baby Kneepads (as if babies don't come prepadded). The mayor of a Connecticut town agreed to chop down three hickory trees on one block after a woman worried that a stray nut might drop into her new swimming pool, where her nut-allergic grandson occasionally swam. A Texas school required parents wanting to help with the second-grade holiday party to have a background check first. Schools auctioned off the right to cut the carpool line and drop a child directly in front of the building — a spot that in other settings is known as handicapped parking.

We were so obsessed with our kids' success that parenting turned into a form of product development. Parents demanded that nursery schools offer Mandarin, since it's never too soon to prepare for the competition of a global economy. High school teachers received irate text messages from parents protesting an exam grade before class was even over; college deans described freshmen as "crispies," who arrived at college already burned out, and "teacups," who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution.)

This is what parenting had come to look like at the dawn of the 21st century — just one more extravagance, the Bubble Wrap waiting to burst.

All great rebellions are born of private acts of civil disobedience that inspire rebel bands to plot together. And so there is now a new revolution under way, one aimed at rolling back the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads. The insurgency goes by many names — slow parenting, simplicity parenting, free-range parenting — but the message is the same: Less is more; hovering is dangerous; failure is fruitful. You really want your children to succeed? Learn when to leave them alone. When you lighten up, they'll fly higher. We're often the ones who hold them down.

A backlash against overparenting had been building for years, but now it reflects a new reality. Since the onset of the Great Recession, according to a CBS News poll, a third of parents have cut their kids' extracurricular activities. They downsized, downshifted and simplified because they had to — and often found, much to their surprise, that they liked it. When a TIME poll last spring asked how the recession had affected people's relationships with their kids, nearly four times as many people said relationships had gotten better as said they'd gotten worse. "This is one of those moments when everything is on the table, up for grabs," says Carl Honoré, whose book Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children from the Culture of Hyper-Parenting is a gospel of the slow-parenting movement. He likens the sudden awareness to the feeling you get when you wake up after a long night carousing, the lights go on, and you realize you're a mess. "That horrible moment of self-recognition is where we are culturally. I wanted parents to realize they are not alone in thinking this is insanity, and show there's another way." 

How We Got Here
Overparenting had been around long before Douglas MacArthur's mom Pinky moved with him to West Point in 1899 and took an apartment near the campus, supposedly so she could watch him with a telescope to be sure he was studying. But in the 1990s something dramatic happened, and the needle went way past the red line. From peace and prosperity, there arose fear and anxiety; crime went down, yet parents stopped letting kids out of their sight; the percentage of kids walking or biking to school dropped from 41% in 1969 to 13% in 2001. Death by injury has dropped more than 50% since 1980, yet parents lobbied to take the jungle gyms out of playgrounds, and strollers suddenly needed the warning label "Remove Child Before Folding." Among 6-to-8-year-olds, free playtime dropped 25% from 1981 to '97, and homework more than doubled. Bookstores offered Brain Foods for Kids: Over 100 Recipes to Boost Your Child's Intelligence. The state of Georgia sent every newborn home with the CD Build Your Baby's Brain Through the Power of Music, after researchers claimed to have discovered that listening to Mozart could temporarily help raise IQ scores by as many as 9 points. By the time the frenzy had reached its peak, colleges were installing "Hi, Mom!" webcams in common areas, and employers like Ernst & Young were creating "parent packs" for recruits to give Mom and Dad, since they were involved in negotiating salary and benefits.

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Once obsessing about kids' safety and success became the norm, a kind of orthodoxy took hold, and heaven help the heretics — the ones who were brave enough to let their kids venture outside without Secret Service protection. Just ask Lenore Skenazy, who to this day, when you Google "America's Worst Mom," fills the first few pages of results — all because one day last year she let her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. (That is probably a bit excessive more on the permissive side of parenting which, as we know, has rather grim outcomes,) A newspaper column she wrote about it somehow ignited a global firestorm over what constitutes reasonable risk. She had reporters calling from China, Israel, Australia, Malta. ("Malta! An island!" she marvels. "Who's stalking the kids there? Pirates?") Skenazy decided to fight back, arguing that we have lost our ability to assess risk. By worrying about the wrong things, we do actual damage to our children, raising them to be anxious and unadventurous or, as she puts it, "hothouse, mama-tied, danger-hallucinating joy extinguishers."

Skenazy, a Yale-educated mom who with her husband is raising two boys in New York City, had ingested all the same messages as the rest of us. Her sons' school once held a pre-field-trip assembly explaining exactly how close to a hospital the children would be at all times. She confesses to being "at least part Sikorsky," hiring a football coach for a son's birthday and handing out mouth guards as party favors. But when the Today show had her on the air to discuss her subway decision, interviewer Ann Curry turned to the camera and asked, "Is she an enlightened mom or a really bad one?" (See pictures of a diverse group of American teens.)

From that day and the food fight that followed, she launched her Free Range Kids blog, which eventually turned into her own Dangerous Book for Parents: Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry. There is no rational reason, she argues, that a generation of parents who grew up walking alone to school, riding mass transit, trick-or-treating, teeter-tottering and selling Girl Scout cookies door to door should be forbidding their kids to do the same. But somehow, she says, "10 is the new 2. We're infantilizing our kids into incompetence." She celebrates seat belts and car seats and bike helmets and all the rational advances in child safety. It's the irrational responses that make her crazy, like when Dear Abby endorses the idea, as she did in August, that each morning before their kids leave the house, parents take a picture of them. That way, if they are kidnapped, the police will have a fresh photo showing what clothes they were wearing. Once the kids make it home safe and sound, you can delete the picture and take a new one the next morning.

That advice may seem perfectly sensible to parents bombarded by heartbreaking news stories about missing little girls and the predator next door. But too many parents, says Skenazy, have the math all wrong. Refusing to vaccinate your children, as millions now threaten to do in the case of the swine flu, is statistically reckless; on the other hand, there are no reports of a child ever being poisoned by a stranger handing out tainted Halloween candy, and the odds of being kidnapped and killed by a stranger are about 1 in 1.5 million. When parents confront you with "How can you let him go to the store alone?," she suggests countering with "How can you let him visit your relatives?" (Some 80% of kids who are molested are victims of friends or relatives.) Or ride in the car with you? (More than 430,000 kids were injured in motor vehicles last year.) "I'm not saying that there is no danger in the world or that we shouldn't be prepared," she says. "But there is good and bad luck and fate and things beyond our ability to change. The way kids learn to be resourceful is by having to use their resources." Besides, she says with a smile, "a 100%-safe world is not only impossible. It's nowhere you'd want to be." (See pictures of eighth-graders being recruited for college basketball.)

Dispatches from the Front Lines
Eleven parents are sitting in a circle in an airy, glass-walled living room in south Austin, Texas, eating organic, gluten-free, nondairy coconut ice cream. This is a Slow Family Living class, taught by perinatal psychologist Carrie Contey and Bernadette Noll. "Our whole culture," says Contey, 38, "is geared around 'Is your kid making the benchmarks?' There's this fear of 'Is my kid's head the right size?' People think there's some mythical Good Mother out there that they aren't living up to and that it's hurting their child. I just want to pull the plug on that."

The parents seem relieved to hear it. Matt, a textbook editor, reports that he and his wife quit a book club because it caused too much stress on book-club nights, and stopped fussing about how the house looks, which brings nods all around the room: let go of perfectionism in all its tyranny. Margaret, a publishing executive, tells her own near-miss story of how she stepped back from the brink of insanity. On her son's fourth birthday, she says, "I'm like 'Oh, my God, he's eligible for Suzuki!' I literally got on the phone and called 12 Suzuki teachers," she says, before realizing the nightmare she was creating for herself and her child. Shutting down your inner helicopter isn't easy. "This is not a shift in perspective that occurs overnight," Matt admits after class. "And it's not every day that I consciously sit down and ask myself hard questions about how I want family life to be slower or better."

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Fear is a kind of parenting fungus: invisible, insidious, perfectly designed to decompose your peace of mind. Fear of physical danger is at least subject to rational argument; fear of failure is harder to hose down. What could be more natural than worrying that your child might be trampled by the great, scary, globally competitive world into which she will one day be launched? It is this fear that inspires parents to demand homework in preschool, produce the snazzy bilingual campaign video for the third-grader's race for class rep, continue to provide the morning wake-up call long after he's headed off to college.

Some of the hovering is driven by memory and demography. This generation of parents, born after 1964, waited longer to marry and had fewer children. Families are among the smallest in history, which means our genetic eggs are in fewer baskets and we guard them all the more zealously. Helicopter parents can be found across all income levels, all races and ethnicities, says Patricia Somers of the University of Texas at Austin, who spent more than a year studying the species at the college level. "There are even helicopter grandparents," she notes, who turn up with their elementary-school grandchildren for college-information sessions aimed at juniors and seniors. (See pictures of Barack Obama's college years.)

Nor is this phenomenon limited to ZIP codes where every Volvo wagon just has to have a University of Chicago sticker on it. "I'm having exactly the same conversations with coaches, teachers, parents, counselors, whether I'm in Wichita or northern Canada or South America," says Honoré. His own revelation came while listening to the feedback about his son in kindergarten. It was fine, but nothing stellar — until he got to the art room and the teacher began raving about how creative his son was, pointing out his sketches that she'd displayed as models for other students. Then, Honoré recalls, "she dropped the G-bomb: 'He's a gifted artist,' she told us, and it was one of those moments when you don't hear anything else. I just saw the word gifted in neon with my son's name ..." So he hurried home and Googled the names of art tutors and eagerly told his son all about the special person who would help him draw even better. "He looks at me like I'm from outer space," Honoré says. "'I just wanna draw,' he tells me. 'Why do grownups have to take over everything?' "

"That was a searing epiphany," Honoré concludes. "I didn't like what I saw." He now writes and lectures about the many fruits of slowing down, citing research that suggests the brain in its relaxed state is more creative, makes more nuanced connections and is ripe for eureka moments. "With children," he argues, "they need that space not to be entertained or distracted. What boredom does is take away the noise ... and leave them with space to think deeply, invent their own game, create their own distraction. It's a useful trampoline for children to learn how to get by." (See pictures of college mascots.)

Other studies reinforce the importance of play as an essential protein in a child's emotional diet; were it not, argue some scientists, it would not have persisted across species and millenniums, perhaps as a way to practice for adulthood, to build leadership, sociability, flexibility, resilience — even as a means of literally shaping the brain and its pathways. Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and the founder of the National Institute for Play — who has a treehouse above his office — recalls in a recent book how managers at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) noticed the younger engineers lacked problem-solving skills, though they had top grades and test scores. Realizing the older engineers had more play experience as kids — they'd taken apart clocks, built stereos, made models — JPL eventually incorporated questions about job applicants' play backgrounds into interviews. "If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being" in life, Brown has argued, "play is as fundamental as any other aspect.'' The American Academy of Pediatrics warns that the decrease in free playtime could carry health risks: "For some children, this hurried lifestyle is a source of stress and anxiety and may even contribute to depression." Not to mention the epidemic of childhood obesity in a generation of kids who never just go out and play.

Remember, Mistakes Are Good
Many educators have been searching for ways to tell parents when to back off. It's a tricky line to walk, since studies link parents' engagement in a child's education to better grades, higher test scores, less substance abuse and better college outcomes. Given a choice, teachers say, overinvolved parents are preferable to invisible ones. The challenge is helping parents know when they are crossing a line.

Every teacher can tell the story of a student who needed to fail in order to be reassured that the world wouldn't come to an end. Yet teachers now face a climate in which parents ghostwrite students' homework, airbrush their lab reports — then lobby like a K Street hired gun for their child to be assigned to certain classes. Principal Karen Faucher instituted a "no rescue" policy at Belinder Elementary in Prairie Village, Kans., when she noticed the front-office table covered each day with forgotten lunch boxes and notebooks, all brought in by parents. The tipping point was the day a mom rushed in with a necklace meant to complete her daughter's coordinated outfit. "I'm lucky — I deal with intelligent parents here," Faucher says. "But you saw very intelligent parents doing very stupid things. It was almost like a virus. The parents knew that was not what they intended to do, but they couldn't help themselves." A guidance counselor at a Washington prep school urges parents to find a mentor of a certain disposition. "Make friends with parents," she advises, "who don't think their kids are perfect." Or with parents who are willing to exert some peer pressure of their own: when schools debate whether to drop recess to free up more test-prep time, parents need to let a school know if they think that's a trade-off worth making.

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A certain amount of hovering is understandable when it comes to young children, but many educators are concerned when it persists through middle school and high school. Some teachers talk of "Stealth Fighter Parents," who no longer hover constantly but can be counted on for a surgical strike just when the high school musical is being cast or the starting lineup chosen. And senior year is the witching hour: "I think for a lot of parents, college admissions is like their grade report on how they did as a parent," observes Madeleine Rhyneer, dean of students at Willamette University in Oregon. Many colleges have had to invent a "director of parent programs" to run regional groups so moms and dads can meet fellow college parents or attend special classes where they can learn all the school cheers. The Ithaca College website offers a checklist of advice: "Visit (but not too often)"; "Communicate (but not too often)"; "Don't worry (too much)"; "Expect change"; "Trust them."

Teresa Meyer, a former PTA president at Hickman High in Columbia, Mo., has just sent the youngest of her three daughters to college. "They made it very clear: You are not invited to the registration part where they're requesting classes. That's their job." She's come to appreciate the please-back-off vibe she's encountered. "I hope that we're getting away from the helicopter parenting," Meyer says. "Our philosophy is 'Give 'em the morals, give 'em the right start, but you've got to let them go.' They deserve to live their own lives." (See the 10 best iPhone apps for dads.)

What You Can Do
Among the most powerful weapons in the war against the helicopter brigade is the explosion of websites where parents can confide, confess and affirm their sense that lowering expectations is not the same as letting your children down. So you gave up trying to keep your 2-year-old from eating the dog's food? You banged your son's head on the doorway while giving him a piggyback ride? Your daughter hates school and is so scared of failure she won't even try to ride a bike? "I just want to throw in the towel and give up on her," one mom posts on Truuconfessions.com. "This is NOT what I thought I was signing up for." Honestbaby.com sells baby T-shirts that say "I'll walk when I'm good and ready." Given how many books and websites drove a generation of parents mad with anxiety, a certain balance is restored to the universe when it becomes conventional for people to brag about what bad parents they are.

The revolutionary leaders are careful about offering too much advice. Parents have gotten plenty of that, and one of the goals of this new movement is to give parents permission to disagree or at least follow different roads. "People feel there's somehow a secret formula for parenting, and if we just read enough books and spend enough money and drive ourselves hard enough, we'll find it, and all will be O.K.," Honoré observes. "Can you think of anything more sinister, since every child is so different, every family is different? Parents need to block out the sound and fury from the media and other parents, find that formula that fits your family best."

Kim John Payne, author of Simplicity Parenting, teaches seminars on how to peel back the layers of cultural pressure that weigh down families. He and his coaches will even go into your home, weed out your kids' stuff, sort out their schedule, turn off the screens and help your family find space you didn't know you had, like a master closet reorganizer for the soul. But any parent can do it just as well. "We need to quit bombarding them with choices way before their ability to handle them," Payne says. The average child has 150 toys. "When you cut the toys and clothes back ... the kids really like it." He aims for a cut of roughly 75%: he tosses out the broken toys and gives away the outgrown ones and the busy, noisy, blinking ones that do the playing for you. Pare down to the classics that leave the most to the child's imagination and create a kind of toy library kids can visit and swap from. Then build breaks of calm into their schedule so they can actually enjoy the toys. (See how to plan for retirement at any age.)

Finally, there is the gift of humility, which parents need to offer one another. We can fuss and fret and shuttle and shelter, but in the end, what we do may not matter as much as we think. Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt analyzed a Department of Education study tracking the progress of kids through fifth grade and found that things like how much parents read to their kids, how much TV kids watch and whether Mom works make little difference. "Frequent museum visits would seem to be no more productive than trips to the grocery store," they argued in USA Today. "By the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago — what kind of education a parent got, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children."

If you embrace this rather humbling reality, it will be easier to follow the advice D.H. Lawrence offered back in 1918: "How to begin to educate a child. First rule: leave him alone. Second rule: leave him alone. Third rule: leave him alone. That is the whole beginning."

— With reporting by Karen Ball / Kansas City, Mo.; Alexandra Silver / New York City; and Elizabeth Dias and Sophia Yan / Washington, D.C.

Are You A Helicopter Parent or A Lawnmower Parent?

Helicopter parent is a colloquial, early 21st-century term for a parent who pays extremely close attention to his or her child's or children's experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. The term was originally coined by Foster W. Cline, M.D. and Jim Fay in their 1990 book Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility, although Dr. Haim Ginott mentions a teen who complains, "Mother hovers over me like a helicopter..." on page 18 of the bestselling book Between Parent & Teenager published in 1969. Helicopter parents are so named because, likehelicopters, they hover closely overhead, rarely out of reach, whether their children need them or not. In Scandinavia, this phenomenon is known as curling parenthood and describes parents who attempt to sweep all obstacles out of the paths of their children. It is also called "overparenting". Parents try to resolve their child's problems, and try to stop them coming to harm by keeping them out of dangerous situations. In addition, these parents try to control every person, event, item, gift which is given to their child in an unhealthy control of their life which eliminates the joy of discovery and discernment for the child.  Temper tantrums and anger are a result of this strangling hold by the parents and their rigid expectations.

Some college professors and administrators are now referring to "Lawnmower parents" to describe mothers and fathers who attempt to smooth out and mow down all obstacles, to the extent that they may even attempt to interfere at their children's workplaces, regarding salaries and promotions, after they have graduated from college and are supposedly living on their own. As the children of "helicopter parents" graduate and move into the job market, personneland human resources departments are becoming acquainted with the phenomenon as well. Some have reported that parents have even begun intruding on salary negotiations. An extension of the term, "Black Hawk parents," has been coined for those who cross the line from a mere excess of zeal to unethical behavior, such as writing their children's college admission essays.
Definition: Wikipedia

Obama Will Triumph...So Will America!

 By Frank Schaeffer

          Before he'd  served even one year President  Obama lost the support of the easily distracted left and engendered the white hot rage of the hate-filled right. But some of us, from all walks of  life and ideological backgrounds -- including this white, straight,  57-year- old, former religious right wing agitator, now progressive writer and (given my background as the son of a famous evangelical leader) this unlikely Obama supporter -- are sticking with our President. Why?--  because he is succeeding.

We faithful Obama supporters still trust  our initial impression of him as a great, good and uniquely qualified man  to lead us.

Obama's steady supporters will be proved right.  Obama's critics will be remembered as easily panicked and prematurely  discouraged at best and shriveled hate mongers at worst.

The Context of the Obama  Presidency

Not since the days of the rise of fascism in  Europe , the Second World War and the Depression has any president faced  more adversity. Not since the Civil War has any president led a more bitterly divided country. Not since the introduction of racial integration  has any president faced a more consistently short- sighted and willfully  ignorant opposition - from both  the right and left.

As the President's poll numbers have fallen so  has his support from some on the left that were hailing him as a Messiah  not long ago; all those lefty websites and commentators that were falling  all over themselves on behalf of our first black president during the
2008  election.

The left's lack of faith has become a self-fulfilling  "prophecy"-- snipe at the President and then watch the poll numbers fall  and then pretend you didn't have  anything to do with it!

Here is  what Obama faced when he took office-- none of which was his  fault:

# An ideologically divided country to the point that  America was really two countries

# Two wars; one that was  mishandled from the start, the other that was unnecessary and  immoral

# The worst economic crisis since the depression

#  America 's standing in the world at the lowest point in history

# A  country that had been misled into accepting the use of torture of  prisoners of war

# A health care system in free fall

# An  educational system in free fall

# A global environmental crisis of  history-altering proportions
(about which the Bush administration and the  Republicans had done nothing)

# An impasse between culture warriors  from the right and left

# A huge financial deficit inherited from  the terminally irresponsible Bush administration.

And those were  only some of the problems sitting  on the President's desk!

"Help"  from the Right?

What did the Republicans and the religious  right, libertarians and half-baked conspiracy theorists -- that is what  the Republicans were reduced to by the time Obama took office -- do to  "help" our new president (and our country) succeed? They claimed that he wasn't a real American, didn't have an American birth certificate, wasn't  born here, was secretly a Muslim, was white-hating "racist", was secretly  a communist, was actually the Anti-Christ, (!) and was a reincarnation of  Hitler and wanted "death panels" to kill the elderly!

They  not-so-subtly called for his assassination through the not-so- subtle use  of vile signs held at their rallies and even a bumper sticker quoting  Psalm 109:8. They organized "tea parties" to sound off against imagined  insults and all government in general and gathered to howl at the moon.  They were led by insurance industry lobbyists and deranged (but well  financed) "commentators" from Glenn Beck to Rush Limbaugh.

The  utterly discredited Roman Catholic bishops teamed up with the utterly  discredited evangelical leaders to denounce a president who was trying to  actually do something about the poor, the environment, to diminish the  number of abortions through compassionate programs to help women and to  care for the sick! And in Congress the Republican leadership only knew one  word: "No!"

In other words the reactionary white, rube, uneducated,  crazy American far right,combined with the educated but obtuse neoconservative war mongers, religious right shills for big business,  libertarian Fed Reserve-hating gold bug, gun-loving crazies,  child-molesting acquiescent "bishops", frontier loons and evangelical  gay-hating flakes found one thing to briefly unite them: their desire to stop an uppity black man from  succeeding at all costs!

"Help" from the Left?

What did the  left do to help their newly elected president? Some of them excoriated the  President because they disagreed with the bad choices he was being forced  to make regarding a war in Afghanistan that he'd inherited from the worst president in  modern history!

Others stood up and bravely proclaimed that  the President's economic policies had "failed" before the President even instituted them! Others said that since all gay rights battles had not been fully won  within virtually minutes of the President taking office, they'd been  "betrayed"! (Never mind that Obama's vocal support to the gay community is  stronger than any other president's has been. Never mind that he signed a  new hate crimes law!)

Those that had stood in transfixed legions  weeping with beatific emotion on election night turned into an angry mob  saying how "disappointed" they were that they'd not all immediately been translated to heaven the moment Obama stepped into the White House! Where  was the "change"? Contrary to their expectations they were still mere  mortals!

And the legion of young new supporters was too busy  texting to pay attention for longer than a nanosecond. "Governing"?! What  the hell does that word, uh, like mean?"

The President's critics  left and right all had one thing in common: impatience laced with  little-to-no sense of history (let alone reality) thrown in for good  measure. Then of course there were the white, snide know-it-all  commentators/talking heads who just couldn't imagine that maybe, just maybe they weren't as smart as they  thought they were and certainly not as smart as their president. He hadn't  consulted them, had he? So he must be wrong!

The Obama critics'  ideological ideas defined their idea of reality rather than reality  defining their ideas-say, about what is possible in one year in office after the hand that the  President had been dealt by fate, or to be exact by the American idiot  nation that voted Bush into office. twice!

Meanwhile back in the reality-based community -  in just 12 short months -- President Obama:

#Continued to  draw down the misbegotten war in Iraq
(But that wasn't good enough for  his critics)

#Thoughtfully and decisively picked the best of several bad choices regarding the war in Afghanistan
(But that wasn't  good enough for his critics)

#Gave a major precedent-setting speech  supporting gay rights
(But that wasn't good enough for his  critics)

#Restored America 's image around the globe
(But that  wasn't good enough for his critics)

#Banned torture of American  prisoners
(But that wasn't good enough for his critics)

#Stopped the free fall of the American economy
(But that wasn't  good enough for his critics)

#Put the USA squarely back in the  bilateral international community
(But that wasn't good enough for his  critics)

#Put the USA squarely into the middle of the  international effort to halt global warming
(But that wasn't good  enough for his critics)

#Stood up for educational reform
(But  that wasn't good enough for his critics)

#Won a Nobel peace  prize
(But that wasn't good enough for his critics)

#Moved the  trial of terrorists back into the American judicial system of checks and  balances
(But that wasn't good enough for his critics)

#Did  what had to be done to start the slow, torturous and almost impossible  process of health care reform that 7 presidents had failed to even  begin
(But that wasn't good enough for his critics)

#Responded  to hatred from the right and left with measured good humor and  patience
(But that wasn't good enough for his critics)

#Stopped  the free fall of job losses
(But that wasn't good enough for his  critics)

#Showed immense personal courage in the face of an armed and dangerous far right opposition that included the sort of disgusting people that show up at public meetings carrying loaded weapons and carrying Timothy McVeigh-inspired signs about the "blood of tyrants" needing to "water the tree of liberty".
(But that wasn't good enough  for his critics)

#Showed that he could not only make the tough  military choices but explain and defend them brilliantly
(But that  wasn't good enough for his critics)

Other than those  "disappointing" accomplishments -- IN ONE YEAR -- President Obama  "failed"! Other than that he didn't "live up to expectations"!

Who actually has  failed...

...are the Americans that can't see the beginning  of a miracle of national rebirth right under their jaded noses. Who failed  are the smart ass ideologues of the left and right who began rooting for this President to fail so that they could  be proved right in their dire and morbid predictions. Who failed  are the movers and shakers behind our obscenely dumb news cycles that have  turned "news" into just more stupid entertainment for an  entertainment-besotted infantile country.

Here's the good news:  President Obama is succeeding without the help of his lefty "supporters"  or hate-filled Republican  detractors!

The Future Looks  Good

After Obama has served two full terms, (and he will),  after his wisdom in moving deliberately and cautiously with great subtlety  on all fronts -- with a canny and calculating eye to the possible succeeds, (it will), after the economy is booming and new industries are  burgeoning, (they will be), after the doomsayers are all proved not just  wrong but silly: let the record show that not all Americans were panicked  into thinking the sky was falling.

Just because we didn't get  everything we wanted in the first short and fraught year Obama was in  office not all of us gave up. Some of us stayed the course. And we will be proved right.

PS. if you agree that Obama is shaping up to be a great president, please pass this on and hang in there!  Pass it on anyway to ensure that his "report card" gets the attention it deserves.

"Activism is my rent for living on the planet."  Alice Walker

Tips For Teaching Kids Compassion

Guest Author - Sonja Meyer

"Be nice."

Parents send their youngsters off with those two words so casually they may barely think about what they mean. In fact, the words can be relegated to nothing more than a lightweight, feel-good idea about getting along with relative calm and creating no waves.

However, given the importance they deserve, the words can inspire children to a lifetime of caring enough to not only co-exist with others, but to actively help the less fortunate and improve their community. Of course there are no guarantees about what grown children will do given any particular parenting approach. But, if you make the effort, you can evoke compassion in your children and increase the likelihood they will be kind and contributing adults.

The times certainly help open the subject for families. Headlines draw stark attention to the awful reality of lives without compassion: Columbine; Sept. 11; sniper shootings in the nation's capital; terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia.

Short of physical violence are the cruel names, the bullying and the one-upmanship some youth face. "We've gone from being a compassionate society to being a competitive society," says East Syracuse, N.Y., psychotherapist Jennifer Cornish Genovese, who hosts the radio programs "Parenting Matters" on WAER-FM 88 Saturday mornings and "Teen Talk" on WWHT-FM 107.9 and 106.9 Sunday mornings. "Competition often works against compassion."

How do you change that? Start by understanding that compassion is not just feeling sorry for someone or just refraining from hitting your playmate. "It's more than just a feeling," says the Rev. James Bresnahan, a Lutheran minister in Central New York. "Compassion involves the act." It entails both the heart that experiences it and the mind and body that bring it about.

Although you cannot "teach" compassion like a step-by-step math lesson, you can instill it in your children by making changes in your lifelong daily routine and by regularly stepping outside your ordinary schedule to make a difference for someone else.


DAILY ROUTINE: BOND AND MODEL

When it comes to modeling compassion for your children, start with your overall parenting style, and start at birth. Babies need a strong, loving bond with a caregiver, whether it is a mother, a father, a grandparent or another adult.

Without that attachment, babies will later have difficulty showing love and kindness, says Alice Sterling Honig, professor emerita of child development at Syracuse University. The early weeks and months of infancy are crucial. "It's the beginning," Honig says. "Whether it's about a skill in football, a skill in math or a skill in compassion, it's the beginning that really matters. "When you have a relationship that's loving and secure with an adult, then you are probably going to be able to give to others in life the way you were given unto," says Honig, who has written several child development books.

Respond quickly to your child's cries and learn to give him what he needs, whether it's a clean diaper, a hug, a drink or just reassurance. Babies won't remember the sweet words you whisper, Honig says, but they will remember "deep in their bones that they were given unto."

As infants become toddlers, however, it's important they observe parents modeling the kind of behavior they are to emulate. "Kids see our every move," Genovese says. "Are we modeling in the grocery store by pushing ahead in line, or are we letting the older person go ahead?"

Just like a 1-year-old will copy her parents by tapping away on a computer keyboard, children will copy social behaviors from their caregivers. "We model compassion by being nice to each other, my husband and I," says marriage and family therapist Linda Stone Fish of Central New York.

Analyze your own parenting style. It likely fits within one of three categories.

Permissive parents, for example, let the child do just about anything. They don't enforce rules and usually go along with whatever the child wants. They don't set high expectations for the child's behavior.

At the other end of the spectrum is the authoritarian model. Such parents won't let the child get away with anything. They are quick to crack down and often yell orders. Punishment is used to get immediate obedience.

Then there are authoritative parents, who are not too permissive and not too authoritarian. "You are for your kid 100 percent," Honig says. "You have clear rules, reasons for the rules, a genuine interest in your child's needs and high expectations."

Honig says the authoritative approach is the best for raising a compassionate child. "If you are very permissive, you get a spoiled brat. If you are authoritarian, you get a real sneak. He may be an altar boy and always says 'Yes, sir,' but he knows how to beat up kids and cheat on tests and hide it," Honig says.

If you are authoritative, you are kind but firm. You help children find alternative ways to deal with situations, encouraging their input. When they act inappropriately, you teach prosocial behaviors. Your goal is for children to do the right thing because of internal desire to do so, not because they fear punishment.


OLDER KIDS: TALK, TALK, TALK

As children get older, talking becomes even more important. They need to talk about their feelings, your feelings, and what other people may need or feel. They need to know it's not OK to make fun of others who are different; moreover, they need to imagine what others may be experiencing.

Bresnahan says teaching such sensitivity and awareness is an important component of instilling compassion. "Parents should expose their kids to people and circumstances beyond what they meet every day," he says. That can start with sharing the newspaper. "If there is an earthquake somewhere in the world, talk about what it must be like to have lost a home."

Parents should talk about how kids who are different from them feel. They can discuss kids who are overweight, boys who are thin and slight, children who are of a different race or social clique or any other "difference" kids see.

Parents should also encourage their children to talk about what they themselves may experience at school or in the community. Are they having problems with bullies? Help your child resolve these conflicts peacefully.


OUTSIDE THE ROUTINE: VOLUNTEER

Besides making changes in your day-to-day life, you can build on this groundwork by regularly involving your children in volunteerism.

"It's not just telling kids 'Go volunteer,'" Genovese says. It's doing it with them and showing them that helping others is important to you.

When Jim and Marcie Sonneborn's first son was 3, he helped them distribute toys at the United Way's Christmas Bureau. Seventeen years and two more sons later, the Central New York family still makes the Christmas Bureau an annual tradition.

"My kids have a lot of things," Jim Sonneborn explains. "They are very blessed. They are bright and have the opportunity to get a good education. They have two parents in the same household.

"Not everybody has all those advantages,” Sonneborn explains. “I want them to appreciate their getting a pile of things when other kids may only get one present. It transcends the specifics of the Christmas Bureau. It also teaches them it feels good to help other people.”

And when families volunteer together, the spirit is contagious. Sonneborn says his sons also volunteer as individuals with their own specific projects, such as playing piano at a nursing home.

Parents of school-age children will find that they often have an ally in their child’s teacher and school administrators. Many schools offer what is called “character education,” a subject required by many states who passed safe schools legislation after the Columbine tragedy. The laws cover everything from child abuse to codes of conduct to anti-harassment training. They also have prompted schools to expand value lessons like respect and caring.

Many schools offer opportunities for students to get involved in service projects like Habitat for Humanity, school ground cleanup days, clothing drives, and toy distributions.

You can also encourage children to find their own way to help. One 13-year-old
started volunteering at a jewish home when he was 8. He became particularly close to a resident who later died. The experience taught him "it makes me feel really good to help people," he says.

When Carol Leonard's children were young, they regularly helped make about 150 sandwiches to take to a homeless shelter. "I felt they should be doing something for the less fortunate and realize there were others who didn't have everything," she says.

The childhood experience took root. Now Leonard's daughter, 40, practices the compassion she first observed at her parents' knee. She volunteers regularly at charitable agency where she sorts clothing, performs office duties, and helps out with the after-school program.

She espouses the same ideals her parents discussed and demonstrated.

"I'm not a prejudiced person," Leonard's daughter says. "Whether you're a lawyer, a doctor or a janitor, wherever you live and however you get by, you're still a person. You have feelings and you have wants, needs and ambitions. We are all created equally."

You should take the time to instill compassion in your children because there's a good chance they will carry that belief into adulthood and become caring and contributing members of society.


FAMILY VOLUNTEERING TIPS

Here are age-appropriate ideas:

Ages 1-4: Accompany adult on visit to nursing home; go along on Meals-on-Wheels delivery.
Ages 5-7: Make sandwiches for the homeless; again, come along to nursing homes or home visits.
Ages 8 and up: Help set tables and serve food at soup kitchen;
collect clothing or supplies.
Teens: Volunteer at senior homes; help visually impaired go for walks; read to children in day care.
Whole family: Create holiday cards for hospitalized children or senior citizens; make favors for nursing homes or Meals-on-Wheels.

In addition, the United Way is a clearinghouse for volunteer opportunities. Call your local United Way for volunteer projects.

23 Countries Ban Corporal Punishment of Kids in Homes

The typical parent, when whacking a misbehaving child, doesn't pause to wonder: "What does science have to say about the efficacy of corporal punishment?" If they are thinking anything at all, it's: "Here comes justice!" And while the typical parent may not know or care, the science on corporal punishment of kids is pretty clear. Despite the rise of the timeout and other nonphysical forms of punishment, most American parents hit, pinch, shake, or otherwise lay violent hands on their youngsters: 63 percent of parents physically discipline their 1- to 2-year-olds, and 85 percent of adolescents have been physically punished by their parents. Parents cite children's aggression and failure to comply with a request as the most common reasons for hitting them.
The science also shows that corporal punishment is like smoking: It's a rare human being who can refrain from stepping up from a mild, relatively harmless dose to an excessive and harmful one. Three cigarettes a month won't hurt you much, and a little smack on the behind once a month won't harm your child. But who smokes three cigarettes a month? To call corporal punishment addictive would be imprecise, but there's a strong natural tendency to escalate the frequency and severity of punishment. More than one-third of all parents who start out with relatively mild punishments end up crossing the line drawn by the state to define child abuse: hitting with an object, harsh and cruel hitting, and so on. Children, endowed with wonderful flexibility and ability to learn, typically adapt to punishment faster than parents can escalate it, which helps encourage a little hitting to lead to a lot of hitting. And, like frequent smoking, frequent corporal punishment has serious, well-proven bad effects.


The negative effects on children include increased aggression and noncompliance—the very misbehaviors that most often inspire parents to hit in the first place—as well as poor academic achievement, poor quality of parent-child relationships, and increased risk of a mental-health problem (depression or anxiety, for instance). High levels of corporal punishment are also associated with problems that crop up later in life, including diminished ability to control one's impulses and poor physical-health outcomes (cancer, heart disease, chronic respiratory disease). Plus, there's the effect of increasing parents' aggression, and don't forget the consistent finding that physical punishment is a weak strategy for permanently changing behavior.


But parents keep on hitting. 


Why? The key is corporal punishment's temporary effectiveness in stopping a behavior. It does work—for a moment, anyway. The direct experience of that momentary pause in misbehavior has a powerful effect, conditioning the parent to hit again next time to achieve that jolt of fleeting success and blinding the parent to the long-term failure of hitting to improve behavior. The research consistently shows that the unwanted behavior will return at the same rate as before. But parents believe that corporal punishment works, and they are further encouraged in that belief by feeling that they have a right and even a duty to punish as harshly as necessary.


Part of the problem is that most of us pay, at best, selective attention to science—and scientists, for their part, have not done a good job of publicizing what they know about corporal punishment. Studies of parents have demonstrated that if they are predisposed not to see a problem in the way they rear their children, then they tend to dismiss any scientific finding suggesting that this presumed nonproblem is, in fact, a problem. In other words, if parents believe that hitting is an effective way to control children's behavior, and especially if that conviction is backed up by a strong moral, religious, or other cultural rationale for corporal punishment, they will confidently throw out any scientific findings that don't comport with their sense of their own experience.
The catch is that we frequently misperceive our own experience. Studies of parents' perceptions of child rearing, in particular, show that memory is an extremely unreliable guide in judging the efficacy of punishment. Those who believe in corporal punishment tend to remember that hitting a child worked: She talked back to me, I slapped her face, she shut her mouth. But they tend to forget that, after the brief pause brought on by having her face slapped, the child talked back again, and the talking back grew nastier and more frequent over time as the slaps grew harder.
So what's the case for not hitting? It can be argued from the science: Physical discipline doesn't work over the long run, it has bad side effects, and mild punishment often becomes more severe over time. Opponents of corporal punishment also advance moral and legal arguments. If you hit another adult you can be arrested and sued, after all, so shouldn't our smallest, weakest citizens have a right to equal or even more-than-equal protection under the law? In this country, if you do the same thing to your dog that you do to your child, you're more likely to get in trouble for mistreating the dog.


The combination of scientific and moral/legal arguments has been effective in debates about discipline in public schools. Twenty-eight states and the District of Columbia have banned corporal punishment in the schools. But so far, we have shown ourselves unwilling to extend that debate beyond the schools and into the ideologically sacred circle of the family. Where the argument against corporal punishment in the schools has prevailed, in fact, it has often cited parents' individual right to punish their own children as they, and not educators acting for the state, see fit. The situation is different in other countries. You may not be surprised to hear that 91 countries have banned corporal punishment in the schools, but you may be surprised to hear that 23 countries have banned corporal punishment everywhere within their borders, including in the home.
I know what you're thinking: Are there really 23 Scandinavian countries? Sweden was, indeed, the first to pass a comprehensive ban, but the list also includes Hungary, Bulgaria, Spain, Israel, Portugal, Greece, Uruguay, Chile, Venezuela, and New Zealand. According to advocates of the ban, another 20 or so countries are committed to full prohibition and/or are debating prohibitionist bills in parliament. The Council of Europe was the first intergovernmental body to launch a campaign for universal prohibition across its 47 member countries.
Practically nobody in America knows or cares that the United Nations has set a target date of 2009 for a universal prohibition of violence against children that would include a ban on corporal punishment in the home. Americans no doubt have many reasons—some of them quite good—to ignore or laugh off instructions from the United Nations on how to raise their kids. And it's naive to think that comprehensive bans are comprehensively effective. Kids still get hit in every country on earth. But especially because such bans are usually promoted with large public campaigns of education and opinion-shaping (similar to successful efforts in this country to change attitudes toward littering and smoking), they do have measurable good effects. So far, the results suggest that after the ban is passed, parents hit less and are less favorably inclined toward physical discipline, and the country is not overwhelmed by a wave of brattiness and delinquency. The opposite, in fact. If anything, the results tell us that there's less deviant child behavior.
There could conceivably be good reasons for Americans to decide, after careful consideration, that our commitment to the privacy and individual rights of parents is too strong to allow for an enforceable comprehensive ban on corporal punishment. But we don't seem to be ready to join much of the rest of the world in even having a serious discussion about such a ban. In the overheated climate of nondebate encouraged by those who would have us believe that we are embroiled in an ongoing high-stakes culture war, we mostly just declaim our fixed opinions at one another.
One result of this standoff is that the United States, despite being one of the primary authors of the U.N.'s Convention on the Rights of Children, which specifies that governments must take appropriate measures to protect children from "all forms of physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation," is one of only two nations that have not ratified it. The other is Somalia; 192 nations have ratified it. According to my colleague Liz Gershoff of the University of Michigan, a leading expert on corporal punishment of children, the main arguments that have so far prevented us from ratifying it include the ones you would expect—it would undermine American parents' authority as well as U.S. sovereignty—plus a couple of others that you might not have expected: It would not allow 17-year-olds to enlist in the armed forces, and (although the Supreme Court's decision in Roper v. Simmons has made this one moot, at least for now) it would not allow executions of people who committed capital crimes when they were under 18.
We have so far limited our national debate on corporal punishment by focusing it on the schools and conducting it at the local and state level. We have shied away from even theoretically questioning the primacy of rights that parents exercise in the home, where most of the hitting takes place. Whatever one's position on corporal punishment, we ought to be able to at least discuss it with each other like grownups.
Alan E. Kazdin, who was president of the American Psychological Association in 2008, is John M. Musser professor of psychology and child psychiatry at Yale University and director of Yale's Parenting Center and Child Conduct Clinic.