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A pastor in Memphis says no baptisms for babies born out of wedlock
A Baptist pastor in Memphis is taking a misguided stand against teen pregnancy by refusing to baptize babies born to unwed mothers.
Ralph White hopes to shame young men into marrying their baby mamas, by refusing to baptize their babies. It’s hard to see how this is supposed to work. Isn’t it the babies and mothers who are being punished here? I thought baptism had something to do with saving your eternal soul. Refusing it seems like a pretty harsh punishment for something your parents did (or didn’t do) before you were born.
The Rev. White isn’t really consigning little babies to the inferno if their parents won’t get hitched. He’s open to the possibility of doing the baptisms – just not in church. We need to make sure we don’t condone this kid’s behavior in front of people, you know. Or something.
Burglary booty: Candyland and vegetables?
You might be tempted to say that news of two 6-year-olds and one 3-year-old burglarizing the neighbor’s home is evidence that kids are growing up too fast. But check out this list of stolen items:
A Candyland game, a box of Little Debbie’s Fudge Rounds, a couple of hammers and a jar of vegetables. Vegetables! How cute is that?
Actually, not very.
The three Covington, La., young’uns also took a pack of cigarettes and some money. One of the 6-year-olds pulled a gun on a police officer, who had been called to the burglarized home. The boys were playing across the street from the scene of the crime and the officer went over to ask a few questions.
Continue reading »
A single mom is entitled to a little playtime, too.
Thanks to Erica Jong and her recent essay in the The Wall Street Journal, there’s been a lot of discussion lately about attachment parenting. My Strollerderby buddies Paula and Madeline had different takes on the provocative piece, though both agree that Jong seems to misinterpret AP and portrays it as something more regimented and less flexible than it really is.
Virtually everyone would agree that no parent should ever feel as if he or she has to be ever-present for their children. Adults must be allowed to be adults, even if it’s just for little spurts at a time.
But that still doesn’t mean you should sex up your neighbor while your kids are (probably not) asleep in the room down the hall. Continue reading »
When you Google "single mother," this is the first image that comes up. Because we're all upset. Because our kids are so bad. Right?
Hooray! At least I finally have an explanation for why my daughter continually poops her pants…
The U.K.’s Telegraph reports that “12 per cent of children brought up by one parent displayed behavioural problems by the age of seven, it was disclosed, compared with just six per cent of youngsters raised by both natural parents.” This based on research conducted on 14,000 British children born between 2000 and 2002, as part of the Millennium Cohort Study.
Researchers found that “family make-up, parental qualifications and household income had a major effect on children’s behaviour at a young age, which could have damaging long-term consequences.” And in a separate analysis, “researchers also discovered that children with younger mothers had a much more difficult start in life than those with mothers over 30.”
But of course, so often, all of these things go hand in hand. A young girl gets pregnant at let’s say 20. She drops out of college (if she was going at all), tries living with her boyfriend. They both work part-time, so they don’t have much money. They argue because they’re broke, which leads to a break-up. The young girl, now 21 or 22, lives alone, trying to raise her child. The child has a “difficult start in life” as a result, which leads people like Lisa Calderwood from London University’s Institute of Education to say, “Living apart from natural fathers can be associated with poverty and negative outcomes for children.”
Okay, but here’s the thing. How is it that “living apart from natural fathers” is automatically the reason that children in the scenario I described above could potentially wind up troubled? There’s some kind of faulty logic working here. If a child’s natural father is unemployed or abusive, his presence does not automatically change that child’s life circumstances for the better. In these situations, it’s ridiculous to say that the presence of a child’s biological father functions as some kind of Deus Ex Machina, made to fix everything up neat and tidy at the end of the play.
You might think it natural and obvious that children raised by both of their biological parents have the best advantages in life. Before I started continually consuming parenting studies, I would have guessed that, too. But studies have shown that it’s actually lesbian couples who make the best parents. Their kids are the smartest and best behaved on the block. So what kind of stone-age reasoning is being applied here? It doesn’t take a genius to realize that a child needs – above all else – a parent and/or parents and/or family members and friends who truly, deeply love him/her and have his/her best interests at heart. That’s it. You can’t convince me that the child of a marriage betrayed but intact or a child living in the presence of an abusive relationship is “better behaved” than a child raised by a single mother – or single father, for that matter. Or Grandparent, Aunt, Uncle or even a family friend. When will we stop heralding the hetero nuclear family over all else at all costs? Continue reading »
Visiting a classroom can be stressful for divorced parents
I dread parent’s night at my kids school. Being in a sea of other parents always gives me a terrible case of Maternal Imposter Syndrome. They’re older, they’re richer, they’re more organized. They’re doing this parenting thing right and they make it look easy.
It’s gotten easier with time, and it’s easier with my biological kids. I remember the awkwardness when I was showing up for these things as a new stepmother. No one at the school knew me. I never did school pickups or dropoffs. But there I’d be at the parent-teacher conference, the school play, the back-to-school night. A third wheel in an already crowded room.
Those memories surged to the surface reading Joel Schwartzberg’s account of being a divorced dad in his kids’ classroom on back-to-school night.
Joel talks about the delight of getting to peek into his son’s desk, of seeing his daughters’ awkward kindergarten self-portraits. For all the parents, this is a chance to peer into the mysteries of their child’s school life. For Joel, there’s the special thrill of being there at all: school tends to be his ex-wife’s domain.
She does all the drop-offs, all the pick-ups, all the battles over homework and the morning rush to be on time. He gets the highlights when he picks the kids up for the weekend.
Divorced parents: how do you handle these awkward transitions with your family? My husband and I always went to all the school things, and hung out awkwardly with his ex-wife and her partner like acquaintances you don’t quite know how to talk to.
Photo: alamosbasement
More by Sierra Black:
Why I Don’t Miss Homeschooling
How Smartphones Made The Playground Fun
This Sunday is National Grandparents Day, and new research shows we have a lot to thank them for. According to the new Census Bureau data, more and more grandparents are raising their grandchildren. Seven million children live with at least one grandparent, and 2.9 million are raised exclusively by a grandparent. That’s 16 percent higher than in 2000–a big jump of 6 percent happened between 2007-2008.
The reason? Researchers point to the recession and the strain on families, single parents who can’t make ends meet and are overwhelmed with financial burdens.
Proportionally, having grandparents in the house is more common in African American and Latino households, but between 2007-2008 the sharpest rise was among White parents.
What do the grandparents have to say about this? Continue reading »
Well, not exactly. But since when has Bill O’Reilly ever cared about the truth?
O’Reilly reportedly slammed Jennifer Aniston for comments she made while promoting her upcoming film, The Switch, in which she plays a single woman seeking a sperm donor.
US Weekly quotes Aniston as having told reporters, “Women are realizing… that they don’t have to settle with a man just to have that child. Times have changed and… what is amazing is that we do have so many options these days, as opposed to our parents’ days when you can’t have children because you have waited too long.”
Nothing too edgy there. It’s not like Aniston burned her bra, tattooed the symbol of Venus on her chest and declared a war on men. But that’s what good ol’ Billy would have you believe.
“She’s throwing a message out to 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds that, ‘Hey you don’t need a guy. You don’t need a dad,’” he told his FOX News audience. “That is destructive to our society.”
O’Really, O’Reilly? Give me a break. Continue reading »
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