Should Military Mothers Be Deployed Overseas?

A recent post about a single mother soldier who refused deployment to care for her son has spurred a lively debate about what limits and protections, if any, should be afforded to mothers in the military.

While some commentators are arguing that women have no place in the army whatsoever, others are arguing that no soldier deserves special treatment and that women who “shirk their responsibilities make things harder for those who are trying to receive equal treatment.” Continue reading »

Swine Flu - CDC Estimates 540 Pediatric Deaths

One of the problems in trying to figure out exactly how serious swine flu is is the fact that the CDC stopped counting cases early on in the pandemic.

Six months in, however, they think they have some pretty reasonable estimates about what’s happened so far.  And while swine flu has definitely not proven to be the big killer everyone feared, there’s no doubt that this flu season is serious.

Continue reading »

Balloon Boy Parents Expected to Plead Guilty

The balloon parents reportedly plan to plead guilty tomorrow morning on a variety of offenses linked to the hoax.

Continue reading »

Teen Hero Saves Paralyzed Man

An eagle-eyed teen spotted a car at the bottom of an embankment from the window of his school bus last Friday in Sullivan Country, NY.  He alerted his mom after the bus dropped him off, she checked it out and a life was saved.

Continue reading »

Keeping Kids Safe Behind the Wheel

The parents of Hamilton County, IN want to reduce teen traffic accidents in a big way, and have come up with safe driving initiatives called Now Think Now and Buckle Down.

Continue reading »

Mommy, Can I Make a Facebook Profile? Please!?!?

Mom and Dad delight in rediscovering old chums.  High-schooler James uses it to make plans, publish goofy photos and check out the hotties who are friends of friends.  But now 10-year-old Abigail wants her own Facebook page.  Should you let her?

Both Facebook and MySpace require users to be thirteen, but…come on.  Site administrators may not know that a portion of their users still have American Girl dolls languishing on their beds and, even if they care, will likely not find out.  Is this a bad thing? Opinions from experts fall all over the map, as CNN found out when it recently raised the question.

Continue reading »

Should You Tell Your Kid You Were Canned?

So you figured that it would happen at one point in your life and it finally did.  You’ve been fired.  Pink-slipped.  Handed your walking papers.  Now what on earth do you tell the kids?

My initial gut would have been to sugarcoat it…spin a fairy tale worthy of Walt Disney himself.  But then I read a piece in the Huffington Post by Mika Brzezinski’s, co-anchor of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.   A few years before landing the cable gig,  Brzezinski was a hot shot at CBS News:  anchor of the weekend newscast and correspondent for 60 Minutes Wednesday.  A network shakeup sent her to the unemployment line, clutching a severance package and a bruised ego.

Continue reading »

11-Year-Old Girl Gives Birth on Her Wedding Day

Upon holding up her newborn child for cameras, 11-year-old Kordeza Zhelyazkova said, “I’m not going to play with toys any more - I have a new toy now.”

Yikes.

Kordeza went into labor during the wedding ceremony to her teenage boyfriend Jeliazko Dimitrov. She still was still wearing the white dress and tiara when she gave birth to her daughter, Violeta.

Continue reading »

Halloween at the Cyrus House: Totally Creepy

I’m well aware that the inappropriate sexualization of the Cyrus sisters is old news by now, but I just can’t stop being horrified by it.

Miley’s little sister Noah recently attended a fund-raising Halloween gala in a costume that would be scandalous for a thirty-year-old married woman. Noah is nine.

Unfortunately, the photo to the right is just the grade schooler in her usual get-up, which is far less disturbing than her vampire (I think?) costume, which is below. Continue reading »

They Say: Maybe a Little Screen Time is Not So Bad

It seems that the recent refund offer by Disney was the spark that reignited the flame of a decades-old controversy:   Is television harmful to tots?   Are we a society of lazy, selfish parents that use the screen as a live-in babysitter?  And if so, are we creating a society of mush-brained mutants that call the remote “Daddy”?

Julia Pimsleur Levine, mother of 2 and creator of Little Pim, an educational foreign-language DVD series for the toddler set, has weighed in with the following letter:

Continue reading »