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Strollerderby
No child should ever be in the position to hold one of these
I can’t say this enough times, apparently: Just because mostly everyone can be parents doesn’t mean everyone should be parents.
A 19-month-old boy in Bethlehem, PA., was found wandering the streets of his neighborhood last weekend holding a marijuana pipe in one hand and a pack of smokes in the other. He was wearing nothing but a diaper as it rained during his parade.
Police responded to a call from neighbors who had taken him inside to get him cleaned up and fed while trying to track down his parents.
Seriously. It's not worth it.
Chances are you remember Alexandra V. Tobias, the mother who was convicted of shaking her baby to death because he cried while she was playing FarmVille. Now another woman has admitted to allowing her child to die while she was on Facebook. Shannon Johnson was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison because her 13-month-old son drowned in the bathtub while she was in another room, consumed with playing Cafe World.
Johnson’s son died Sept. 20 after she left him alone in the bathroom for a few minutes, Colorado’s 9News.com reports. Johnson told officers her infant had been “playing in the tub for 10 minutes and she had checked on him once.” According to police records, “When three minutes passed without the sound of him playing, she went to check on him and found him on his side with his face in the water.” Continue reading »
Last year, parenting magazine Brain, Child ran the first-person account of Bridget Kevane, a Bozeman, Mont., mother who was arrested and charged with child neglect.
Her crime, in a nutshell, was bad parenting. But more specifically, local officials didn’t like that she dropped her 12-year-old daughter, the daughter’s 12-year-old friend, and the tweens’ charges, an 8-year-old sibling, a 7-year-old friend and a 3-year-old sibling in a stroller.
Kevane’s punishment for “bad parenting” was nearly as absurd as the case itself, described here at Spike Online. Kevane neither pleaded guilty nor was exonerated by a jury, since a mock-jury organized by Kevane’s lawyer showed how her community in Bozeman would not have been sympathetic to what, at worst, was a lapse of judgment. (You know, being a parent.) Continue reading »
Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, has declared May 22 “Take Our Kids To The Park and Leave Them There Day”. Today, she runs a great essay by an Arizona man on what the authorities might or might not do to parents who dare to go ahead with this crazy scheme.
The short answer is whatever they want. Neglect laws in many states – including Arizona and Massachusetts, where I live – are subjectively enforced. The bottom line is that you have to provide appropriate food, shelter, clothing, supervision and care for your kids.
It’s up to individual cops, judges and social workers to decide whether or not letting your kid play unsupervised at your local playground is neglectful.
What if bad mothering — the truly shocking, sickening kind, the kind that leads to child abuse or even worse — was something you were hardwired for?
Some researchers say they think it is. According to this Times of London story, neurologist Craig Kinsley believes that the brain creates a new cluster of cells during pregnancy that appear to be related to good or bad parenting behaviors. These “maternal neurons” get switched on after birth — and too few lead to bad mothering behaviors.
“We believe that a certain number of these ‘maternal neurons’ need to be ‘switched on’ for good mothering to take place,” Kinsley told the Times. “Our research showed Continue reading »
We’ve all been there, drunk and passed out on the fast food restaurant playland, the kids joyfully amusing themselves. It’s the picture of a perfect afternoon until the dumb cops arrive. So presented with such an intrusion, naturally you turn your children into weapons.
And who wouldn’t? We’ve all dreamed of controlling our own vicious legion of toddlers, eager to do our evil bidding. I mean, that’s why we had kids in the first place. But quickly after they’re born we learned our babies are more interested in gnawing on the corner of a Dora blanket than being our henchman.
But one drunk father in Colorado Springs never gave up.
Joshua Alger, 28, is the aforementioned man. When McDonald’s employees called the police on the prostrate Alger the cops realized he already had a warrant out.
So Alger released his hounds kids. Alger freaked, commanding his kids to “bite the officers’ faces off.” They didn’t.
And what is the punishment for sicking your kids on the cops? You get tased, bro. No, the cops did not tase the kids too.
One wonders if this was a scenario he’d already prepared for, training his kids to attack on command. On a serious note, let’s hope these kids have more sober relatives willing to take them.
Source: Denver Westword
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