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Strollerderby
Unless you live under a rock somewhere, you are by now aware of the fact that actor Charlie Sheen is rapidly and very publicly going off the rails. Between his most recent overdose, his drug-fueled rages in swanky hotels and his deranged-sounding call-in radio rants in the past week, Sheen – who has a long history of substance abuse problems – is clearly in very, very serious trouble. Continue reading »
Is a glass of wine a mom's best friend?
On the playground one day with my own infant, I saw a baby wearing a onesie that said, “Mommy drinks because I cry.”
That’d be funnier if it wasn’t true. An article in Working Mother magazine says, sadly, moms are drinking to handle the stress of motherhood. Alcoholism and drug abuse are way up among working mothers.
Moms having a drink or two (or three, or four…) at the end of a long day isn’t news to anyone who’s on Twitter or Facebook. Kid bedtime rolls around and my Twitter feed explodes with status updates about what everyone’s drinking, and jests about how badly they need those drinks.
Remember the “smoking toddler,” the two-year-old Indonesian boy who became an international sensation last month when a video circulated of him chain-smoking?
People were universally outraged at the sight, even more so when they learned that the boy’s father first gave him cigarettes when he was only 18 months old.
Good news: according to The Sun, Ardi Rizal has cut down his habit to 15 cigarettes a day from the 40 he had been smoking.
A child welfare official told The Sun that the child’s addiction is being treated with “therapy focused on playing.”
Previously, Indonesian officials had offered to buy the family a car if the boy quits smoking. Continue reading »
Most teens who try cigarettes have no intention of becoming addicted. Smoking is just something they do for fun when they are hanging out with their friends. And if you asked, they would probably tell you that while they are aware the health hazards related to smoking, they personally have nothing to worry about. They are casual smokers who don’t light up enough to become addicted.
Or so they think. According to a new study, just how much it takes to turn that casual, just-for-fun smoker into a full-blown addict may be far less than previously thought. Continue reading »
Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or don’t have Internet access), you must have seen — or at least heard about — the latest viral sensation, the video circulating of Ardi Rizal, the 2-year-old Indonesian boy smoking cigarettes. Cable news networks, the nightly news programs, and parenting web sites (including this one) all played up the story which was guaranteed to attract attention.
Not surprisingly, people were outraged. Who wouldn’t be? I don’t think anyone would argue that giving cigarettes to a 2-year-old is a good or even acceptable idea. It was even more disturbing to learn that the boy’s father first gave him cigarettes when he was only 18 months old.
But I couldn’t help but feel icky about the whole thing. Obviously, I felt disgusted by the idea of a toddler with a nicotine habit. But my real problem with the video is that it made it too easy for us to feel superior to this kid and his family. Continue reading »
Babble blogger and author Katie Allison Granju has been writing openly about her life as a mother for years. She has walked the line between keeping her kids’ lives private while divulging details of her own. For years, she held back one fact in particular — to protect her son’s privacy, to keep judgment at bay. Until now.
While sitting at her son’s bedside as he fights to recover in an intensive care unit, she decided she no longer wanted to keep this part of her life private.
Her latest Home/Work post title says it all: “The parenting secret I am no longer willing to keep.” Katie writes, quite bravely — and with some lingering internal conflict about whether she’s doing the right thing — that she is the mother of a drug addict. Her 15-year-old son is in the hospital recovery from a near fatal overdose.
It should not be surprising that there are opinions. Continue reading »
Anyone who doubts the Internet’s addictive potential need only look at this sad case of child neglect. A husband and wife have been caught and arrested after their 3-month-old daughter died of severe dehydration and malnutrition. The couple had been on the run for five months. Police say the couples’ addiction to online gaming led them to spend all their time at an Internet café, only coming home once a day to feed their child. Continue reading »
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